New blog, starting Japanese

So, this is the new blog wherein I discuss all the language acquisition stuff that I do. For now, you can expect to hear about me starting out with Japanese, getting better at Spanish with particular focus on figurative language and conversational skills, improving my Arabic, and maybe starting up again with French (if not that, then just listening to French techno). There will be talk of what I'm doing, what I've learned, and probably lots of other bits and pieces.

I've decided to start learning Japanese with the goal of teaching English in Japan after two or so years. Right now I'm working on learning the alphabets, or more accurately, syllabaries. The Japanese writing system includes Katakana, which is used for words taken from languages other than Chinese, Hiragana is for other phonetic writing. There is also Kanji, which are symbols that are not written phonetically and which represent words/morphemes.

For the moment, I'm mostly just working on learning the Hiragana. I've been using A Guide to Learning  Hiragana & Katakana. It's been useful, but I don't think they really give you enough space to practice.

And for the curious, here is a chart that shows all the Hiragana.

I feel pretty ready to get going on learning some actual words, but I know it's best to wait until I have this down at least. I think while I get the rest of the letters down, I'm going to start on some listening stuff. I heard that Japanesepod 101 is quite useful, so I'm going to try that out.