Well, it may have taken a little while buy I have the basic hirigana memorized, now onto dakuten and combo hirigana. Should be interesting how things will continue since school starts in 2 weeks. I have made a goal of studying Japanese for at least 30 mins a day, after i finish my homework that is, or as a break from my homework. We'll have to see how things play out.

I'm Baaaaaack

Ok, its been far far to long since I posted anything and I've wasted much of the summer. my original goal was to have the hirigana, and possibly the katakana memorized by the end of the summer. Unfortunately I'm a queen of procrastination and haven't gotten quite to it. I have bought "Learning Japanese Hirigana and Katakana" by Takagaki & Henshall to help me.

Personally I've found I memorize things better if i repetitively write them down. such as learning to spell or my multiplication tables. When I was a kid my dad would help me with my spelling by going over the words for the next quiz and if I got one wrong he would have me write it out 10 times. It helped me, so I have a notebook I've been using to write out the hirigana in to assist in memorization.

Also I've finally bitten the bullet and bought a lifetime membership to textfugu.com.

Now that I've learned the pronunciation of all the kana, and pronouncing the Japanese "r" is not easy, its on to memorizing the actual written kana. Wish me Luck.

well my lazy butt is finally running out of excuses not to be going to textfugu and learning Japanese. so we are back to hirgana, which fortunately has a pattern of sorts to it so its not that hard to learn the pronunciations. it appears we are gonna focus on memorizing the symbols a little later. but even though i'm writing this blog to track how productive i'm being i'm still taking actual notes. i even bought a really cool looking binder(a picture of which i'll post sometime), that i figured would make it easier to separate chapters out and add more paper to particular chapter if needed. but i feel i'm doing a good job with this simple pronunciations so that gives me confidence to keep going forward.

I have returned. I know I haven't updated this in over 20 days, and i have no excuse but to say i was being lazy and procrastinating. But now I have a binder in which to practice writing what I'm learning. If you know of any worksheets that are designed to help people learn to wright the different "alphabets" let me know. What I'm working on know is learning how to properly pronounce what textfugu refers to as the foundation hirigana. If I can successfully learn to properly pronounce them it will make learning Japanese that much easier. Wish me luck.

Just finished the first lesson in Textfugu. It was an overview of the four different japanese alphabets. Can you believe it, 4 different alphabets. Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji and the newest, and least used, romanji. Romanji is japanese written out using the letters we are all familiar with. But since there are several different schools of thought on how to write using romanji it is best to save learning it till much later.
Textfugu has me starting off with Hiragana. wish me luck.

Welcome to my Blog. its my goal to learn Japanese, with the hope of eventually going to Japan. I'll be posting my progress on learning. And maybe about a few other things in my life. I'm working on finding the best place to learn. I have found a site called TextFugu and there is something called Anki. I'll keep up to date on how they work out and what other programs or classes I take.