Kyomaster Posts

I don't remember too well how long I have been going at the attempt to learn Japanese. Must have been two years now. Two poorly attempted years where I failed to retain any knowledge regarding Hiragana. Two poorly attempted years where in the second year I did nothing. All I did was study Hirgana for a while and then drop off Katakana. Then in December, I went to Japan with my family. It was astounding I tell you. Absolutely astounding. And it opened my eyes.

There I was, sounding out what Hiragana I could and failing to make out the Katakana and even Kanji. I was inspired in many ways by my trip to Japan. Most importantly, I was inspired to truly make the effort to learn the language. Using the vast resource that is the internet as my guide, I would learn Japanese.

In the early moments of my studies, Namasensei was my teacher in Japanese. I did not fully watch his videos though, and a shame it is at that. But his videos did help to create a certain foundation in my Japanese. I had found his videos from this very thread actually. I have also been using flash card type programs to help in keeping the Hiragana and Katakana in mind. On the android, there is an app called "Hiragana Cars" that also has Katakana for learning. A good app for on the go study of the two characters. A website I would use was (www.realkana.com), a website where one would choose groups of Kana and then be shown Kana from the groups and the type out the phonetics of the character. Was also good.

Down the line, I found recommendation for the Anki digital flash cards. The site claims that the system is intelligent, but I like it more because my flash cards are stored online and can be accessed anywhere. I am still finding out about the program, but nonetheless it is good.

One other site I came across was a site called "Japanese for the Western Brain", (http://kimallen.sheepdogdesign.net/Japanese/index.html). I haven't taken a good look at it yet, but it does seem to be a promising read that would surely help in learning the language.

Overall, I feel I am doing quite well on my Japanese studies and I will continue my efforts until the battle is over.

List of sites I am using
http://www.realkana.com/
http://kimallen.sheepdogdesign.net/Japanese/index.html
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.solnus.android.Hiragana&hl=en (Android App, "Hirgana Cards")
http://www.elanguageschool.net/japanese/

English is one of the easiest languages to learn depending on what sentence structure your current langauge is. If you said you spoke Spanish or French before I wuld not be surprised even when in my french classes I never payed attention but it was easy to get everything because it was practically just english. I even know a friend who came from Israel and said she learned English from tv/movies. What makes Japanese different is the sentence structure ,many western languages have the same dialect which in't the same for Japanese. Why do you think whenever you hear a Chinese,Japanese or Korean person speak with bad English, it always sound mixed up, because they are trying to speak English with there original sentence structure.

One of the worst ways to learn Japanese, is by thinking of how to say things in English 1st, you have to think like a native speaker to become one, and that's why so many people end up quitting or taking them 2 years to become fluent. They always think as English speakers. That's what I'm saying the reason you want to learn Japanese better be a good one, since you will not succeed, especially if you start getting thought like, "I don't mind reading ENG subtitles, it's easier anyways", since the further you get into the language trust me it get's hard, but after the hard part it get's easy. All I am generally saying is if you are not the most committed person to something don't learn the language, since you won't finish