Looking for Advice!

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!

Entering kana using romanji on a pc is pretty easy these days. You can do it online, just Google “japanese input online” and also you can easily Google on how to set up your browser/os for kana input with romaji. I would not bother looking for a kana keyboard. All Japanese people I know (and I have lived there for 3 years) used romaji input.

Kana is also remarkably straight forward to learn. There is a one to one relationship between symbol and sound. 100% of the sounds are present in English so you will know how to make them (ok alexandrec, 97 % :)) It is just a matter of going through the flashcards, kana to romaji, over and over again until you know them. Unless you like calligraphy, I suggest putting off learning the writing of the kana until you have time.

Good choice Owyn !!

(That’s all I can tell you, actually …)

Hello, thanks for the great suggestions.

During my research alot of people and sites suggested against learning Romaji as they claimed it wasnt a mainstream form of writing in Japan. I’ve already started on the Kana and im using a program to help me memorize them all, so everything is starting to work out.

As for learning how to write, I agree that can wait until I learn them all by visual queue.

Thanks again for the advice, I’m excited to be apart of the community!

Check out AJATT, for a radically different way of learning Japanese. (Or other languages.)

FWIW “learning Romaji” is not the same as "entering kana on a pc using Romaji " (which is what almost every Japanese person does)