Section 1 Update

Section 1 of TextFugu has nearly been conquered - a least the introduction phases have. It promped me to ask a few questions regarding why I'm learning Japanese in the first place. The philosophy behind that is that writing down a set goal that will be aided by learning Japanese makes you more motivated to persevere with the courses. TextFugu is great for that by the by; keeping you motivated, which I find is the hardest thing to do in any self-taught lesson.

Question 1: Why are you learning Japanese?

I want to experience a completely different way of life than what I have found growing up in Africa. I feel like I'll find what I'm looking for in Japan; from everything I've seen of it in films it seems so different. I want to live and work there with art or conceept design in future. The only way to immerse yourself in a culture is to understand it. I'm learning Japanese to be able to explore Japan.

Question 2: What are your excuses for not wanting to study?

The point of this one was to get any excuses out of your system and know in advance why they are wrong. Because "I'm too busy with I.B", "I don't feel like it today", "whats the point?", "Just one more funnyjunk post", "I'll just give up anyway." Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong, they're all awful excuses. My reason for sticking to it is in question 1, thats why I won't give in to them.

I've already been trying to learn from different sources, so I can more or less read the hiragana 'alphabet'  so most of the section so far has been a recap for me. In summary, it talked about the romaji, hiragana, katakana and kanji 'alphabets' of Japanese, all making up the written language.

Romaji is the romanisation of spoken Japanese, which is largely useless since it wasn't designed for learning the Japanese language.
Hiragana is the most used 'alphabet', a large part of the written text is written this way and is only for Japanese language.
Katakana is the lesser used of the 'alphabets' with all the same sounds as hiragana with different symbols. This is used to spell out foreign words.
Kanji are the complex figures in which a single symbol refers to a subject, verb, noun, etc. These were takken originally from the Chinese language.

That's about it for now I think, although I'll be writing another summary like this one to help reflect and remember the sections after every practice page. It's all going well so far, although I'm just worried the sections are a bit wordy, or might become that way anyway... Although that might just be because I already know what this section is covering. Anyhoo, on to the next bit.