altarkazain4516 wrote:Thanks for the answer!
Also, when's a good time to check the video lessons, like the ones where you learn hiragana?
Right now!!
I wasted untold amounts of time because I thought I'd pick the kana up as I went along. I didn't. You can do kana flashcards until you're blue in the face but you'll still find it hard to tell the difference between ね and れ and わ, or ぬ and め, or は and ほ. As soon as you learn to write them, they're really easy to tell apart. The good news is: it's much, much easier than you think it's going to be.
Get some paper and a decent pen (I like gel pens but YMMV), then watch the
Kantan Kana video series and follow along. That's important -- don't just watch it, do what it says and use pause and rewind as necessary. Afterwards practise the characters you learned, saying the sound as you do them because you need to associate the shape with the sound. As you watch each episode keep adding the new characters to your practise until ultimately you're writing out the entire set. This whole process is going to take a lot less time than you think it will.
The payback for the effort is huge. You'll be surprised how much Japanese you can read--you may often have no idea what it means, but you'll know exactly what it sounds like (and in the case of katakana an astonishing amount is thinly disguised English words, so you may very well be able to figure out what it means). It makes pronunciation easier because when you read a word in romaji (Japanese in English letters), you have to think about where the syllable breaks are, which you don't have to do with kana. And once you know the kana, you'll start picking up a few kanji here and there almost without noticing.
マイケル
