Excited starting my self study!

[Benny]

For about 18 months I've had a fascination with Japan and it's culture. I have wanted to learn the language but everytime I applied to a course I either couldn't raise the money or they were booked out.

Last week I made the decision to dive in head first with my own self-study techniques, and I must say I'm so excited to be doing this!

I am a little worried about pronunciation (even with the Genki text book and CD) so does anyone have any tips on how I can work on this area? I am too inexperienced to seek out Japanese speaking friends yet (for conversation anyway) so mainly looking at internet sources for now.

After learning the whole basic Hiragana chart (in just a few hours with 100% recall I'll happily add!) I'm now ploughing through the Katakana characters, what I am unsure of is whether I should learn extra vocab/kanji or just follow the Genki textbook? I have enough time to study hard each day but I don't want to rush through the book.

Anyway I am glad to have begun my studies and with a little direction I think I'll look back and be grateful the official courses were booked out when I applied

[chryuop]

I wish I had somewhere close to me where they teach Japanese...heck I wouldn't study on my own! Nothing replaces real class lessons.

[Kasomi]

I would say that listening to songs would be something good to practice your hearing Japanese pronounciation, but it's not all since even in songs you can't learn everything (sometimes they change the sound and everything so... yeah, you'll need to find something else to complete)

I once found a nice website for pronounciation of various languages, so I might be able to refer it if I find it again... AH HA! Found it.

Japanese: Vocabulary Guide | 日本語: ボキャブラリー・ガイド

You choose a category and after you can hear what it's supposed to sound like, pronounced by a Japanese^^ You need a plugin though, but I hope this will help! And for dokushuu (which is self-study), good luck! And if I can give you some other advice: don't take too seriously what you hear in anime, you can't learn good japanese in there, so make your own speech style, don't copy it from animes, I heard that from my master often enough^^

I know there is also softwares that play pronounciations and then you repeat and they like "hear" you and show you if you were great of wrong... but I can't remember the softwares name... sorry. I hope I helped a little.

がんばってね！