Hello, within the last week I’ve really got the urge to start learning a new language. After alot of thought, I chose Japanese. I love anime and I love the Japanese culture as a whole, I hope to one day move there.
I stumbled upon this site during my research to get started on the process, but I’m having a bit of a hard time. The first lesson I did was hard as I do not know all of the kana yet, so I basically had to LingQ every word/phrase.
What I’m wondering is, should I start studying the kana before I even attempt to use this site? I’ve got the hiragana and katakana charts downloaded onto my computer, and I’ve got a program called Anki ready to help teach me the japanese alphabet.
Also, I dont really want to learn Romanji at all. I want to be able to read and write in Japanese, and not use Romanji as a crutch, even if it is to help me along in the beginning.
… Lastly (Wall of text, sorry :P) The Anki program I use sometimes shows me the english letter for letters in the japanese alphabet, and I am supposed to enter what I think the Japanese symbol for it is. The problem is, my keyboard doesnt have any visual queues as to which english letter corrosponds with a japanese one, when I switch it to japanese mode. Is there some type of Japanese Digital keyboard I can download, but with just the japanese characters so that it isnt cheating? (Edit I made a mistake, you dont actually imput the symbol into the program, you’re just supposed to guess it and then it shows the real one… Still, I’d like to have a way to type japanese without going out and buying a whole new keyboard, but I will do that If I have to!)
Sorry if it’s a little confusing, basically im just asking for a way to enter the Japanese character into the program to see if I got it right, without spamming my english keyboard via trial and error to find out which is what.
Thanks for all the help in advance, I’m excited to learn Japanese and It’s going to be a great challenge, since I have to learn a whole new alphabet!