I picked up the hiragana in about six hours, but am having trouble with the katakana.
I have I really hard time with these pairs:
ƒ“ ƒ\ ƒV ƒc
so,n shi,tsu
(if you can't see the characters, I have my browser encoding set to Japanese (Shift-JIS), if that does anything... otherwise I'm using a font you don't have)
I'm kinda scared to try and start learning all of the kanji. (7000+ i think)
My only resources so far have been japanese-online.com & thejapanesepage.com are there any better resouces online?
Use a translation program that translates from English to Japanese. There IS one available for download out there. I know this because one of the people at the company I used to work for was Japanese, and she would get technical papers from japanese websites and read them. It was useful to have the translator becuase it could do most words. And it could present an english website in Japanese. Of course it wasn't perfect, but it came very darn close.
One thing to remember if you are going to learn the characters: you can think of them as direct translations from english words. But the better way is to try to understand the reasoning for how the character is constructed. Get into that mindset, and you'll build an intuition about new characters as you come across them. My former co-worker said that english speaking people always had the hardest time developing that intuition because they didn't realize that ideas are the basis for the characters. She also said that she runs across a new one every once in a while, but that the character set is not even remotely as unstable as Chinese, where you can run into a character in a village that means something or find a technical idea and not even know what the idea is because of the character.
Right now I'm just getting the hiragana and the katakana down pat. Then I need to get a vocabulary going. Finally I will get into the kanji. After three days of study I can sound out words without having to look up the letters (still need to look up about half of the katakana, but they're not used often in my lessons).
Now I've got my Fedora desktop (GNOME) set to the Japanese language and I forgot how to set it back. On the bright side, I do have a simple Japanese-English dictionary on my iPAQ... I think it has a mode where I draw the kanji and it will tell me what it means. (I hope... I haven't tried it yet.)
I think its funny that じはん (jihan) means crime, but is also an abbreveation for the word for "automobile sales".
On the bright side, I do have a simple Japanese-English dictionary on my iPAQ... I think it has a mode where I draw the kanji and it will tell me what it means. (I hope... I haven't tried it yet.)