Moving On

I finally have committed most of Hiragana to memory.  I still have to stop and think for a second or two when I am thinking of the pronunciation for a particular symbol, but for the most part, I have it down.  I took a mock test on a website for every Hiragana character and I believe I got a 96% and the ones I did miss where just me not taking my time to think of what it might be.

With that being said, my new main focus is on grammar and sentence structure.  Katakana and Kanji are going to be a learn as I go type deal, especially Kanji since there are so many radicals to remember.  Katakana I don’t see as being much of a problem to memorize since I didn’t have much trouble with Hiragana, but I have a feeling Kanji is going to be a different story.  Oh well, I guess that’s why we have dictionaries to use.

Now concerning grammar, the first thing it looks like I’ll be learning is about Nouns, which makes sense since that’s one of the first things you learn about when learning English.  We’ll see how it goes.  I honestly think the biggest problem right now will be trying to remember what words mean what.  I means all great if I can read sentences and all, but that doesn’t do me any damn good unless I know what I’m reading.

One final thing – typing Japanese characters.  Right now, I’m copy and pasting every character I need one by one.  This has gone far past the point where it’s working – I need to invest in a Japanese style keyboard ASAP.  My computer has the the correct language packs and is set to type Japanese characters and can do so with my current keyboard, but I need a keyboard with the characters printed on the keyboard.  It will just make things so much more simple.

Tonight is going to be a heavy study night for me.  I’ve been slacking the past few days.  I don’t really have a good excuse for it either and that’s a bad habit to start building this early on.  My goal is to study at least 3-4 hours a night and from this point forward I’m going to do my best to stick with it.

And finally, the word of the day.  ^^  I know I’ve been slacking on this.  However, let’s talk about what I had for dinner tonight.

鶏肉 – Chicken – pronounced 「とり・にく」.  Yeah, I eat 鶏肉 a lot, so I have a feeling I’ll be using this word quite a bit.