Hiragana

As part of the future-facing I have been doing a little lately, Sam and I have been talking about what countries we might like to live in. One place we would both like to live is Japan. But the language barrier is a barrier that needs to be knocked down a little in my eyes. So we have started to try to teach ourselves bits of Japanese. This has happened a few times before in my life, and I always give up after a few failed lessons. I get frustrated when the things I learned yesterday don't stick in my head, and stop making time for it. But this time, I have a partner-in-crime. And a DS :)

We have been using Pictochat to try to practice Hiragana. It's been really good, and has been sticking in my head well. We have learnt the 5 vowels (a,i,u,e,o) and the k, g, s, z, t, d and n variants of them. And wa, wo and n. We learn 5 per night (one lot of vowels), and it has really helped my understanding of the language and pronunciation. I have normally just tried to memorise some words out of books, but learning Hiragana first is definitely the way to go.

And Pictochat and a lovely little hombrew program for DS by Zoelen, called Project JDS (although that link is a little broken at the moment - we found version 1.3 with a little persistent googling), pictured at left. OK, the GUI isn't particuarly aesthetic, but it has been a really helpful tool. In the long run, we would like to pick up some of the other programs that deal with Kanji recognition. Anyway, the DS is an awesome tool for learning Japanese that I recommend to anyone interested in learning.