Trying to learn Japanese

[Meat Puppet]

while hiya in enlgish is a cheerful greeting, in japanese it means you are about to get your ass kicked

[Blue-Fire]

while hiya in enlgish is a cheerful greeting, in japanese it means you are about to get your ass kicked

hahahahahahaha...guess i wont use that in Japan!

[Rengori]

while hiya in enlgish is a cheerful greeting, in japanese it means you are about to get your ass kicked

It's HIYAAAAAA! And it's more like you're about to get face kicked.

[HighSorceressDelial]

....I second the crying.

A forum is probably one of the worst places to learn another language because you only get a basic collection of things that people have learned or assumed, while half of it is wrong.

Although I must disagree with what people keep saying, I think learning Japanese is really easy, it just depends on how you do it. If you can't take a class and are having trouble finding books, go to someplace like e-bay or amazon.com and search for books and interactive computer games. Online you can find a hiragana and katakana chart here:http://yallara.cs.rmit.edu.au/~eluca...nese_chart.pdf It's one of the best ones I've found so far. There's also a lot of sites that can teach you the brush strokes, and quiz you on both hiragana and katakana. You'll have to learn them eventually, so it's always good to at least be framilar with them.

But I mean, it's kind of pointless if you're not going to take it seriously. If you really want to learn you'll have to study almost every day for a very long period of time. When I first started teaching myself, I completely surrounded myself with the language and writing. For example, instead of listening to music in english, I listened to it in Japanese (meaning days/weeks/months on end of only Japanese), on top of getting lots of videos and interviews with Japanese people interacting. I also bought a lot of manga so I could start practicing reading it. And then I got books/tapes/games, and eventually, I was able to start classes (which I'm currently in). It's easy, but only if you put enough work into it.

~Delial

[Blue-Fire]

trust me, i'm studying as much as i can.thanks for the site, too!

[StarlightAngel]

Haiaku-Hurry/quickly
Tsubasa-wing(s?)
Souka-I see
Hai-yes
Oni-Demon/ogre
Kaze-wind

yay for random words that probably aren't right!

[Dark Magic User]

ichi - one
ni - two
san - three
konichiwa - hello
sayonara - bye
sakura - cherry blossom
neko - cat
inu - dog
arigato - thank you
oyasami nasai - good night

here some of the words i have! and good luck!

[Blue-Fire]

thanks!