As my first day of high school is literally as of posting this, the stress levels are at an all time high. This isn't what this post is about though.
This month, I've focused solely on speaking, reading and singing - with more confidence. At the start of this month, I had to sound out every kana before joining it all together and repeating the whole word or sentence. Of course, that isn't a practical method of reading Japanese.
I started off by converting anything I read to romaji. Romaji is a way to write down how each kana is pronounced with Latin letters instead of the hiragana or katakana. For example か would be "ka" in romaji. When you have an entire words in a sentence, the romaji usually separates the words or concepts with spaces. This is especially annoying when singing. You'd expect there to be a tiny break between two words, but no! You go right from one to the other as if they were one word. In a way - there are no spaces in Japanese, so it makes sense to read them in these ways.
Now, I can sort of fluently read stuff. Assuming it's in romaji, which probably doesn't help much, but hey! At least I don't stutter every other word now and I can sing fairly confidently without doubting myself with questions like: "Is this how that's pronounced?".
I hope to bring more news about my progress when I actually make some. Singing is great and all, but if I don't understand the language, there's no point in doing so.