Welp. As I previously said, I’m starting to get the hang of hiragana. It’s a very rewarding feeling. Suddenly a whole new world is unlocked. I can slowly (and painfully) sound out words. Still have to look at the chart for several of them that are confusingly similar. But it’s progress.
As I encounter more adopted words from English and other languages (and there are many) in Japanese, hiragana doesn’t help. Those adopted words are written in katakana. While the characters are different, the sounds they represent are the same. And I’m definitely going to need one of those adopted words for cafe au lait (kafeore or カフェオレ)! Fun trivia: the smiley part of the shruggie emoji is the character tu.
Yesterday, I picked up a copy of the Genki I workbook at Temple’s Charles Library. I was planning to buy the Genki series on the recommendation of Japanese language teachers on faculty, but wanted to look at it to see if it would suit the way I learn language. It does! And it also includes a katakana character chart, which I could help but start studying.
As for kanji characters? I think I’ll just focus on these two for now.
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