Learning Tools Part 2 (学習ツールパートに)

Heisig's Remembering the Kanji

Heisig has made many books.  Very useful books in my style of learning but if books aren't your thing then don't sweat it.  Anyways, Heisig has made books on Remembering the Kana (The alphabets {Hiragana and Katakana}) and Remembering the Kanji (The pictographic symbols that mean whole words)

You can pick up a copy at either Amazon.com or Borders for somewhere around $35.00 but it has 3007 Kanji in it

The basic setup tells you number of strokes, stroke order, and a nice way of remembering how to draw it

 

This book can be paired with the Anki deck Heisig Remembering the Kanji (RTK 1-3) AND the website Reviewing the Kanji 

We have forums! (フォーラム行っている！)

Yes, that is right, the forums are launched and ready to be bug tested.

I've included the site chat and Armi Tunes radio in the bottom of the forums so you can still listen to the calming Japanese epicacy AND chat with anyone online while cruising the forums.  Oh and also the Random Kana app that I made is there too.

Take the time to look them over and register to be able to post.

IchiNi Forums

A Good Video To Help You Understand Japanese!

Hey guys for all of you learning Japanese this is a good video(for when you start to understand dialogue) to help you better yourself in understanding Japanese!

This guy runs a website called alljapaneseallthetime.com

this is one of his videos that might help everyone

Learning Tools Part 1 (学習ツールパートいち)

There are many tools that are helpful when learning Japanese.

Today I'll be covering the SRS Anki.  SRS stands for Spaced Repetition System and basically uses a system of digital flash cards to help you memorize things like the Kana and Kanji (Kana being the 2 types of spelling alphabets and Kanji being the symbols that mean whole words).

There are a good many SRS's out there but I personally use Anki for simplicity.

http://ichi2.net/anki/whyreview.html
(I always thought that it was funny how the Anki website was Ichi2 {I got my display name from the numbers 1 and 2 also...}

The icon is a pair of nice blue stars with a gray backdrop

It will only take a second to go through it's loading sequence

 

The main menu will look similar to this (You won't have anything downloaded yet)

 

Just click on the download button at the bottom left (Near the center) and a crazy list will appear

Honestly, this list is insane... there are like 30million things on it... (Not literally but still a freakin' butt load)

Anyways, if you are just starting out, I'd nab the Japanese Kana deck so that you can learn your Hiragana ひらがな and Katakana カタカナ.  After that, definitely grab yourself a copy of Heisig's Remembering the Kanji (Volumes 1,2 and 3) and then download the Heisig's Remembering the Kanji (RTK) 1-3 and get to work on the 3007 different Kanji that he wrote about...  it is WELL worth it but I will get into that book later on since you should probably focus on the Kana first (PS: I'm only about 30 Kanji in so don't feel like you are behind or anything...  I have only 1% of all of the Kanji :P)

So yea...  Now that you have downloaded the Japanese Kana pack (And maybe the Heisig's Remembering the Kanji just so you have it) you should see this

or if you skipped that and went straight into Kanji (Notice the difference in New Total :P)

But yea...  Just click start reviewing and go through the Hiragana and Katakana (Maybe have some kind of idea of what each is or at least have glanced at a Hiragana/Katakana alphabet before so that you know what to expect) and just chug along at somewhere around 20 per day (Unless you can do more or less...  Just find a number that works for you, don't stress yourself, keep it smooth and consistent)

but yea...  it's not that bad and if you want, you can explore the Deck Properties in the settings menu at the top (On the same bar as File, Edit, Tools, and Help) but that can get a bit complicated...

Anyways, I'll let you get to reviewing the Kana and hope you have fun learning the 430 that come with that deck (Though I can't work out where that comes from...  as far as I can tell, there's only 104 Hiragana and the same of Katakana which adds to be 208...)  I don't know...  either way, have fun and try not to get too stressed out with it

Start of the blog (スタートは、ブログの)

Welp... Here we are. The beginning of the learning of Japanese (Hhaponezz as my friends and I like to pronounce it)

I started this blog to keep track of my progress and to give me another excuse to type and read Japanese. I hope to get all of my friends on here so that we can keep a sort of mini-community of Japanese learners that are at a relatively similar level so that we can help each other out and talk to each other in Japanese

Also, later on I'd love to help other people learn

So, once I figure out how to set this blog up, we'll be cookin' with bacon (ベーコンの料理 {bēkon no ryōri [Romanji!]})

Take a look around and explore the links and such (Assuming that I can actually get links up on the side or something...