Monday, December 7, 2009

Learning Japanese, Setbacks.

Well, for the past two weeks, I have been teaching myself Japanese again. I'm trying to get back into the swing of things with it. I remembered about 95% of the Hiragana and about 75 to 80% of the Katakana. I think after that, I should learn some vocabulary and THEN move to the sentence structure and particles and whatnot. I didn't realize about how hard making sentences were until I attempted to a while back.

I purchased the Japanese Learning game for the DS a LONG while back, and it is helping me out SOOOO much. The lessons are nice and the games actually DO improve on your vocab, brush strokes, and memorization. So far I have learned to count in japanese, even though it is a biiit hard to memorize with 11 and on.., colors, a few vocab words, Hiragana, Katakana, and simple basic sentence structures. I stopped after Chapter 29 (which I call the beginning of chapter 2), and I have been playing the games to relearn the vocab and the Hiragana and Katakana. It just stinks that I lost one of my books I used for studying syllables and it had nice reference sheets at the end. I have a Kanji book (which I look through and learn a Kanji symbol here and there) and a Hiragana/Katakana book. They are helpful, but I love that one book the most. It is actually on Amazon for under 10 dollars. If I can't find it, and I have the money in a few months, I might repurchase it. It is a great book.

I made flash cards a while back, and I found a set based on the months...and man are they semi hard. But I also found a few good sites to look up AS WELL as Youtube channels to aide me JUUUST a bit on memorization and such. It is an interesting thing, learning a language. I know it is easier to learn at a young age, and be being 25 and all, but I'm sure that I can handle it with time. I do get frustrated at times, but it pays off when I am actually starting to memorize these things. It makes me a happy panda.

I have been working on a few things lately, drawings and videos and such as well, but alas, I cannot record audio until I get a new headset. It is strange that it doesn't work. Like, it was fine the night before it broke. I hung it up as per usual, and now poof! I realized it broke when I "recorded" a part of Grandia like...5 times. The commentary wasn't too grand and such. But then I had a decent recording, but I noticed that there weren't any sound waves on the finished recording. I plugged it into my MAC and seen if it was broke and not the PC being stupid again, but it is indeed broken -_-'' Weird how things happen when you CAN do things, but it comes back to bite ya in the butt.

I also seemed to have erased things I shouldn't have when I was attempting to clean out my computer all last week due to it not recording right with the Dazzle, and the computer crashed and met the blue screen of death QUIIITE a few times. I scanned it, defragged it, and I deleted things I don't use too much anymore. Well, it still acted up. I'm not understanding what is going on, but I'm not liking it. This computer is about...a year and a couple months old, so it shouldn't be an issue. I've been taking good care of it too.

But I guess things happen. I don't know what will happen in the future, but I hope the best for this new year since this year as been Hell...utter Hell...