I believe that I am one of the few who has made significant progress on Dr. Dru's Main Experiment. This project aims to introduce Japanese in a fun way in a manner that is somewhat similar to Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata. The project mainly uses emojis to teach words and basic grammar combined with some inductive techniques which help you learn to recognize some Kanji.
I became aware of this project before I started learning Japanese, the author has posted on Reddit and a few times and it never gets the attention it deserves to get. It is by far the most unique way I have seen to try to teach the basics of Japanese and it does a really good job overall. He has also posted his idea of how someone should learn Japanese here.
I was actually shocked how long it actually is. Sometimes the author says it is 100 pages long but if you print it out, which I did, you will find even if you shrink it down to 50%->60% size, it covers about 1000 pages.
The project uses some excellent techniques for teaching the kanji, for example it shows how words are formed. For example, it showed how 重 + 力 = 動く and then how 動 + 物 = 動物. Also there was one where it shows how sea + thief= pirate and adding that to flag makes pirate flag. It was really a brilliant way to teach the vocabulary in context and takes advantage of the unique features of the Japanese Kanji system.
It teaches vocabulary quite well, sometimes even with the image you won't understand the exact meaning but if you read it again, you will see what it means by the context the author has used. The vocabulary is very limited as it should be, but I do think due to the lack of text this would be difficult to recommend as Anki substitute which I wish it was.
The thing I think it serves is showing the Japanese grammar in context in the reading. It is easy to read and understand the way he is illustrating the basic grammar. When you read this, it makes those patterns easy to internalize and thus acquire. If it was longer and covered all the grammar that Tae Kim does, I would recommend this over it, no question.
One basic critique is that it uses too much katakana, I am literally dying every time I see a huge paragraph of katakana. If you notice, most kids books use a lot of hiragana and very little Kanji to start to read. However, if you ask adults to read this they sometimes have to slow down because the Kanji are useful. Similarly I am concerned that there is an abundance of katakana terms which are unnecessary for comprehension.
For example, one part of the story focuses on Frodo going to Elrond's house in the Lord of the Rings. I love the Lord of the Rings as much as the next person, but I felt some sections like this were not as effective because I was focusing on what English words they were trying to mimic with the katakana pronunciation.
Another slight flaw is that narrative is not continuous like Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata. It rather has small stories and parts where it introduces new vocabulary. There is a little story about a Cat and a Dog going to Gabon for example, and there is a Treasure Island story where this old lady robs these pirates only to be saved a gang of monkeys and their friend(the pirate's friend not the monkey's friend).
These stories are entertaining(though again sometimes are hampered by a lot katakana), but a continuous narrative would better for overall retention and seeing the same characters over and over again. Lingua Latina has this strength over almost all the textbooks in the field.
The last thing is that the story inconsistently reintroduces and omits furigana. I do think it's a good idea to leave off the furigana after some exposures to the kanji word but sometimes it will omit the furigana only to reintroduce it on a latter page.
I really enjoyed reading through the first 4 parts, I originally planned on reading 30 pages a day but many times I find myself going beyond that because I want to know what will happen in the next part of the story. I definitely would recommend it as a way of getting used to reading and get some basic grammatical structures.
I hope the author continues expanding it and working on it until it reaches the early N4 level(so around 1500 words of vocabulary, similar to Lingua Latina), at that point it will be a good jumping point to start using graded readers.
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