Week 2 Entry

I have started learning Japanese in my books. One of the books I am using is called The Complete Idiot's Guide to Conversational Japanese and I bought it at a bookstore. I have also began to practice writing in another book I got. Last week, the first week, I got my supplies and made a plan of how much I would like to accomplish. I bought two books for learning how to write on Amazon and then I found a Japanese translation dictionary from a second time around store . I also downloaded an app to help me practice numbers and phrases.

I am enjoying this project so far. I am glad I chose to learn Japanese for my project. In high school, Spanish class and history class were my favorites. Since I took foreign language in high school, this experience is going to be quite different because I am learning a language on my own. So far, learning the greetings and phrases isn't very hard. I have the pronunciation down but I see how different Japanese sentence structure is from English. In English, sentences are subject-verb-object, but in Japanese sentences are subject-object-verb. Learning this new way to structure a sentence is confusing and I'm not going to look into it too much because right now I am just trying to remember basic greetings. When I get further into this project I'll learn more about grammar and sentence structure. I don't want to overwhelm myself.

In my two writing books, I'm not actually writing in the books. I am scanning the pages on my printer and printing off the pages that I am going to work on. I am learning how to write the Japanese alphabet called Hiragana. There are forty-six letters in this alphabet and each letter represents a syllable. For example, the word kasa, which means umbrella, would be written with two Hiragana letters ka + sa. This week I will work on practicing ten Hiragana letters. Next week, I will learn another ten. I think learning ten is just right and I will review the last ten I did with the flash cards I bought.

One thing I really want to research is transportation in Japan. I have a feeling that if I go there I will have no idea how to buy a train ticket. Next week, I am going to look up videos of English speakers explaining transportation in Japan and how to buy a train ticket at a station. I will write about what I find and hopefully I'll find a lot of helpful videos.

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