Beginning to learn Japanese

on saturday i took the greetings and hiragana quizzes at Genki: An integrated course on Japanese. it was so satisfying. i knew the greetings from listening to recordings. and i knew the hiragana from practicing with my handy-dandy flashcards, and the tools mentioned before.

i’d say about 60% of my answers were process of elimination. but mainly i got those by at least having to sound out the hiragana. very slowly, of course. results:
100% on greetings
hiragana 1 - one wrong
hiragana 2 - one wrong
hiragana 3 - 5 wrong!

i thought i knew the hiragana by now, alas. for basics, this page (promoting TileTag software) sums up the kana; including voiced sounds, long vowels and consonants, and the dipthongs.

but it’s a bit more confusing when they have some visual similarities. these are two very helpful articles highlighting confusing hiragana and katakana which look the same, and some notes on pronunciation. About Hiragana and About Katakana, (at Life on the other side of the ocean.)

i’m also going to practice writing the kana instead of just reading it. i prepared some pages to write them out. i think i need to look at them in a different ways too. i’ve also written them down by stroke number. and i need to find more chances to read the stuff. i noticed, really, that kana is not ulitmately useful, because there’s so much kanji in written japanese.

what i’d really like is some kids books with little furigana (little kana to show how to pronounce kanji).

This entry was posted on Monday, August 15th, 2005 at 1:31 pm and is filed under Learning Methods. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.