As promised, the first weekly update is here. I'm constantly revising and picking up new kana at the same time as renshuu is trying to figure out my pace.
Thankfully, I can somewhat keep up. I'm about halfway done with hiragana. Without a doubt, I've been slacking on realkana. This is because I found out renshuu has a "Focused review" mode, where it throws kana at you, and you need to select the right romaji from multiple choices. While still learning, this is great - albeit real Japanese sentences don't happen to have multiple choices available.
Writing
I've attempted to write several kana with a pen. Every time, I failed horribly. In fact, I feel like my (already pretty bad) cursive and print handwriting is deteriorating the more I write in Japanese.
How I'll overcome this problem? I have no clue. I'll just have to hope this is one of those things that resolves itself with enough practice.
Hiragana troubles
This week, I was introduced to kana with little circles & double quote things. They're pretty easy to remember since the original kanu is still visible. However, I always bung it up when differentiating between the two symbols.
For example, へ = he; ぺ = pe; べ = be. See how the letter still sticks, and it's only the first letter that is affected by those symbols? That's where I struggle.
Words I've picked up so far
Renshuu shows an example word with every kana. Surprisingly, some words did, in fact, stick in my brain. Here's a few:
- おめでたう /omedetau/ - congratulations
- めがね /megane/ - glasses
- ねこ /neko/ - cat
- ひ /hi/ - fire
What is ahead of me
Clearly, I didn't know what I was about to tackle as realization set in. See, in my silly and fun world, I thought Japanese used only 1 alphabet per sentence. A little bit of Googling revealed this to not be true - a Japanese sentence can use all 3 alphabets in one sentence. Therefore, unless I'm planning to read manga or listen to songs for children, knowing kanji is a must.
I'm definitely getting cold feet just thinking of learning kanji - there's well over 50000 characters. Now, yes, the average person really only needs to know about 2000 to be considered fluent - but that's still a lot of tiny drawings to remember.
These past few days, reading random Japanese text (eg. in YouTube comments), I start recognizing symbols and even pronouncing certain parts of comments (not the parts with kanji, obviously). I finished writing this on Saturday, and scheduled it to be posted on Monday.