Japanese Punctuation & basic Kanji

[Joyfulldreams]

I have been trying to teach myself Japanese for a looong while. I would love to take a class on Japanese somewhere, but my high school doesn't have a course for it (only Spanish and French...I HATE my Spanish teacher). I am planning on taking one at my local community college during next summer. If I had the time to do it after school before then, I would, but I don't.

Either way, I've been wanting to try and use reading Japanese as a way to help me practice. I am pretty sure that when Japanese is written horizontally, it is read from left to right, and when written vertically, is read from right to left. Correct me if I am wrong.

I cannot do this EITHER, as my STUPID computer doesn't support Japanese characters. T_T Nor do I know any kanji and I don't know Japanese punctuation.

Could somebody give me the basics, but make it so that my stupid computer can show me something besides '?????' Or maybe possibly offer me some guidance as to the learning of the language? I am advanced in English and would love to help anybody who needs help with it.

[MidoriHime]

I think there is a japanese toolbar that you can download on to your computer and it will allow you to write in japanese and kanji. I'll try to figure out where you can download it...I'll warn you, I still have trouble using it on
e-mails. It comes out all messed up when I send it.
You are correct about reading left to right horizontally and right to left vertically.
Trying to read japanese might be difficult if you do not know any kanji. I am
guessing you know hiragana and katakana? About 'japanese puncuation'... a period is like a little circle, and a comma is pretty much the same...
I have been studying japanese for several years as my second language and would love to help you with the basics! Um, if you could tell me how much
of the japanese letters you know, we could start from there...so, please let me know!

[Harold]

Originally Posted by MidoriHime

I'll warn you, I still have trouble using it on
e-mails. It comes out all messed up when I send it.

That's because you send the email with the wrong encoding. Try UTF-8, Japanese SHIFT-JIS, or Japanese EUC-JP.

[Joyfulldreams]

I know exactly why my computer doesn't support Japanese letters. I have Windows XP and for some reason I got a version that did not have the Asian Language Pack on it, and I have to buy it and then download it onto my computer. I don't know where or when I can do that, so for right now I'm just fudging it.