Humble Beginnings

If you can read the Japanese under the title of this website you are probably in the wrong place! And if you can't read it, well you either don't know how to read Japanese, or you simply don't have East Asian language support enabled on your computer. Let's address that last one, in case you fall into that category.

If you use Windows and you can't see any of the Japanese on this site:
How to Install Asian Languages in Windows 98/2K/XP and Vista

For Linux users:
Japanese Text Support In Linux

Since that's out of the way, let's address the other situations:

If you can read the Japanese text below the title of the site, then you should leave me a comment letting me know that it does indeed say: "one language is never enough." As of the time of writing of this post, I cannot read this, and picked it off a webpage. It would be great to verify it does indeed say that!

If you can't read the Japanese text below the title of the site, then you are in the same boat that I am in. Well, let's hope. My boat is heading to Japan! I can't read it either. But that's what this blog is all about. --->

This blog is about learning Japanese! I am going to update this blog everyday with the progress I have made self-learning Japanese. If you want to be along for the ride, hop aboard! From here on out, every post is going to be about what I am currently studying, and how you can study too!

The most important thing, though, is setting goals. I think it is important to have short and long term goals. Possibly medium term goals as well, depending on the proposition. Let me outline my long term goal first:

In three years from this date, give or take a few months, I am going to travel to Japan and stay there for a good amount of time. The details are a little vague, but you should know that I am going to do this. My mind is set. Once I set my mind on something, I don't give up. This is an example. When I arrive in Japan, I want to be able to communicate in Japanese. I don't expect to be perfectly fluent, but I will be able to read and write Japanese well enough to hold a conversation, and hopefully stumble through a newspaper.

My short term goal:

In a week from this date, I want to know Hiragana. I want to know it nearly as well as I know the English alphabet. Learning Hiragana is the first step to learning Japanese. Hiragana is where my journey begins. To keep things clean, we'll talk about Hiragana on the next post.