Yeah- watashi is the safest "pronoun" for most adults, I think. The thing I was trying to get at (ineptly) was that it's age-dependent. Watashi isn't feminine if you're an adult male, but I think it often is if you're a teenager (and male- it's fine for teenage girls). I think if you use watashi as, say, a 14 year old boy it might, at the least, sound awfully prissy, if not downright girlish. Most textbooks don't really talk about this, probably because they assume that most people using them will be adults by the time they are actually speaking Japanese in Japan, and because it's pretty confusing. For instance, I am not quite sure at what point it stops being a bit prissy to use watashi as a guy, but I think that you need some context to really answer that. Anyway, sorry to beat a dead horse- it's just that it took me a while to put the age thing together with it, because no one ever mentions that in texts. That makes a lot of sense if you're teaching people to speak safe Japanese, but less if you're trying to tease out the nuances of a variety of people's dialogue in a text...Trabius wrote: I might have been unclear, but I meant she didn't like to use watakushi herself. If it's used by males, it would probably be (like you said) in really formal situations, but I doubt it would hurt to stick with watashi. As the classroom is a formal setting and we used watashi for politeness, I'd say it's a rather general purpose pronoun for mid-level formality. While watashi is softer, it doesn't really have the overtly feminine tones of say, atashi. But in a casual setting, I'd agree that using boku would be better than watashi.
EDIT: also, since I don't want to double post, a couple of unrelated things: first, I'd call Japanese a "something something V" language (with qualifications). The (main) verb comes at the end of the sentence (or the copula does, of course). But the other elements of the sentence can be moved around rather freely, and still be "correct". I think this is partially because Japanese is postpositional. At any rate Japanese is less dependent on word order than English is when it comes to determining what is subject and what is object, etc. Right-headedness vs left-headedness also comes into play here, and that actually tends to give people bigger problems than plain word order.
And yes, Macko, Japanese have been known to correct my freely spoken (or written, for the most part) Japanese, but, maddeningly, mainly over things that they disapprove of rather than things that are clearly wrong (for instance, my correspondent would really like to think that I am a refined sort, despite lots of evidence to the contrary- thus it drives her nuts when I use gutter Japanese. On the other hand she doesn't bat an eyelash if I drop a particle here and there, as I still do, I'm afraid. About the most instructive comment she'll make if I really screw things up is one telling me that my Japanese is "kawaii", as if that were a compliment.) Well, I suppose that's actually well worth noting.
gotta remember it 
a better way? writing them thousand times?? 
(Still trying to get used to the additional buttons on other people's post when you are a moderator.)