Hi all

[Rhyze]

Hi all, I'm a brand new member of this forum. I found it while searching for resources to help me teach myself Japanese, and it would seem I hit the mother load!

I'm currently using the Rosetta Stone software, which seems to work fairly well, but has a few short comings. I think some interaction with those who either speak the language natively or are reasonably fluent will help me overcome those short comings.

The biggest problem with Rosetta I have found is, while it lets you use them, it really isn't very helpful for learning kanji and hiragana.

Browsing this forum, Ive found many resources that I plan to check out. The biggest problem is what to do first! lol.

Anyway, Thanks for all the good work on this forum, and if anyone has experience with Rosetta, I'd like to hear about it.

Best regards,
Rhyze.

[NTREEG]

I think one of the first things you should do is learn hiragana and katakana right away. It's not that difficult and you can learn them both in just a few weeks if you devote a half hour or so everyday to practicing them. I learned them by picking a row of sounds (for example ka ki ku ke ko) and writing them from memory on a sheet of paper about a hundred times. The next day, I'd pick a new row of sounds (sa shi su se so) and write them a hundred times as well as the hiragana from the previous day (and maybe the day before that too).

It's good to know kana because many of the Japanese dictionaries you'll find will only give you readings in kana and not romaji. Also, unless you are very thorough, it's easy to make mistakes when memorizing vocabulary written in romaji. For instance I learned the word べんきょう　（benkyou) back when I only knew romaji. Often times I forget to pronounce the long "o" sound because I learned it incorrectly as "benkyo" when I read it as romaji. So yeah, get cracking on that kana!

[Rhyze]

Yeah I agree, I'm devoting a little time everyday to learning them. It should be easy now I've found these forums.

The worst thing I found about Romanji is, that there seems to be many different spelling systems. So even if you do find a Romanji dictionary, the spelling is usually wrong.

[timelesssymphony]

avoid romanji, forget it even exists, if you try to think in romanji you will confuse yourself and make numerous spelling mistakes, romanji is for gaijin to butcher in the train station not for some one who is really trying to learn. learn hiragana first then Katakana, practice writing them over and over, the genki I book/ workbook is good for this if your looking for a text.