While I learn my Kana
November 8, 2024, 11:58 am
For the last few months, I've been practicing my Japanese diligently. I have a goal to be able to travel to Japan and be able to communicate. I've always wanted to. I am now at the place where I can more or less recognize all of the Hiragana. This is a big thing for any learner of a new alphabet. I can read Japanese. I can't understand 90% of it, but I can read it. And that is so cool.
I am now learning the katakana, and God help me, I will soon have to learn the kanji. But that day still seems far off. I've begun trying to read conversationally, and it is... very difficult. Manga is way too far off for me. Don't get me wrong, I'm trying. I bought some of the manga I loved like Naruto, One Piece and Dragonball, but even trying to get three pages into any of these is an absolute struggle. Mainly because as soon as you learn the hiragana you feel incredibly accomplished, but as soon as you get into the real world of Japanese, katakana and kanji are EVERYWHERE. Katakana feels like at least 50% of what you'll read.
And this has been mildly disheartening, but also has bolstered my resolve to learn even harder.
I sat down to make myself a reference sheet for the kana, and I am now sharing it with you, dear reader. https://hdraws.com/kana. This is a work in progress, and currently it's mostly useless on mobile. But it is, at the writing of this blog post, only 2 days of work in javascript, react, and css. I did some big work in css grids. I'm learning a lot about keyboard layouts as well.
Anyways. Thats been the last few days for me.