Japanese Log

Jay also found this great website that helps you learn Japanese on your own, and we decided to buy a lifetime membership to his textbook. If any of you happen to be interested, you can read the first few chapters for free to get a feel for it. ANYWAY he encourages us to keep a Japanese log, so I'm just going to use my blog. If this is uninteresting to you, no worries, I'm planning to entitle all of them as "Japanese Log", so you can just skip over those ones :)

Today he talked about the difference between Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Hiragana is sort of like a phonetic alphabet, and Katakana is also, but it is used to spell out foreign words and onomatopoeia, and a couple other uses. Kanji, is like Chinese characters- well, they actually are Chinese characters, but they don't necessarily mean the same thing they do in Chinese, and the all also have several meanings. I've almost memorized all the Hiragana, using the aforementioned smart.fm website, and I'll start Katakana once I have seen every one.

So far, I really like the textbook- very clear, personable and even funny, but I haven't yet seen any of his teaching methods, so more on that later.