Been playing Slime Forest A LOT lately, and I recognize (though some more readily than others) in the neighborhood of 500 kanji! However, since Japanese uses a completely differently alphabet and writing style than English, there is still the matter of putting the actual Japanese words to the Kanji.
Carl is going to register me for the paid version of Slime forest for Christmas and I believe that includes the pronunciation of the Kanji.
Also, I finally broke down and bought a book to teach me to write in Japanese. And it seems to be a really good book.
Tuttle Language Library's Japanese Hiragana for Beginners, by Timothy G Stout. www.tuttlepublishing.com
It's got writing practice and basic vocabulary. It's a lot like an elementary school reading workbook, there's crossword puzzles and a whole bunch vocabulary worksheets in it.
I'm really excited about the whole thing, because the other day I had that moment you get when you're learning something totally new and all of a sudden, your brain shifts and it all makes sense, instead of being a struggle. I got a new kanji on Slime Forest and I looked at it, and recognized all of the radicals in it. I couldn't figure out what the actually representation was, but I got enough of a feel for it that when I got the keyword, it made sense.
It's suddenly been a whole lot easier since then, I guess my brain "gets" Japanese now, even though there's still tons and tons to learn. Apparently, it takes something in the neighborhood of 1300 hours of study to become even moderately fluent in Japanese if you're starting as an English speaker.
The only thing I feel like I'm lacking right now is that I would like to have someone to practice speaking with and since I don't know anyone who is fluent in Japanese and none of my friends are interested in learning, that may be tough. Though I did find an SAT 2 study guide that has a downloadable .mp3 library for pronunciate and listening practice, so I might use that. It's not perfect, but it's certainly better than practicing with the cat.
Ah, well. sayonara!
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