Ta-Ta For Now

So, I'm slowly but surly building up my Hiragana list. I'm up to 20 letters with the addition of the T-family. Do you all think I move much too slow? The thing is I want to have these letters MASTERED before I move on to do more. When I look at a page of Japanese... well, I want to instantly think "KI!" not "Umm... I'm pretty sure...umm... that that's... kiiii(???)" And that is my explenation (in case you were wondering). I think going slow for now is a good aproach. Lots and lot of repetition. Once I master hiragana I will also go back to using Rosetta Stone (I'm kinda looking forward to that).


In other Japanese Learning related news. Thanks to awesome people online I found out about this (supposedly) great book. "Remembering the Kanji" I am wondering if parallel to Rosetta, as well as University Classes, I should invest time (and money) into this book. Ever heard of it friend?




QOTD: What's your personal experience, or the word of mouth you hear, about Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji" series?

Efforts to "Uncomplicate" Japanese Learning

Day 2. Well technically still the same day, just after midnight now, hehe. I decided that Roseta Stone will not do alone in case of Japanese. It is still a great tool, but it was much more... how to say, self-explanatory of a language program when I migrated from a European language to another European tongue. Japanese, as I quickly found out last time, is a whole new ball game. And that is exciting as well as scary for me. After some internet research I have decided that Hiragana is probably the first thing one should master... naturally this assumption might be wrong, but how would I know mate? To my pleasant surprise I have also found many tools for learning Hiragana online! The one that stands out the most, as it teaches you the writing stroke order is this 3-part YouTube series by MasamuneJJ (see lesson 1 below!) ...I just hope that it is accurate, as again, I have no idea how good it really is. On another topic, I'm checking with my university tomorrow to see if I can get into an introductory Japanese class this fall. Will report on that shortly.

Question of the Day: Name some good tips on how to learn Japanese? What study habits or study methods do you use?

The First (Rather Scary) Lesson

Okay, here we go... Day 1. Haven't had much time to learn anything today. I came back from work late and I'm not really in a learning mood when I'm tired. Nevertheless I felt like doing something/anything productive towards my goal of learning Japanese. Thus, I finally installed Rosetta Stone: Japanese Level 1 on my computer. The installation was painless, what came after... very. You see, I turn on the program (just out of curiosity) and in about five seconds thoroughly realise that learning Japanese will be TEN times harder than learning English! Even the very first lesson is very very hard, and using Rosetta for French/Italian before... I know that the first lesson was rather easy when it came to European languages. Question comes to mind, do I have what it takes to learn Japanese?

Question of the Day: What was your personal reaction after your first encounter with learning Japanese, inside the class or otherwise.