Interesting Blog Post Of The Day

For those interested in learning how to read Japanese, earlier this month Anya at the blog Forty-Four Fennecs posted How I Learned Hiragana and Katakana in a Few Hours. It is based on their experiences during their Japanese 101 class and the method that made it all stick. Hint: it involves music!

"About the only things that are regularly translated to romaji are lyrics, since everything else is directly translated to English for the people who don’t know Japanese, and the ones who do know Japanese can read in the original kanji/hiragana/etc. But songs are for singing so you need to know how they’re said, hence the giant surplus of romaji that’s in relatively random (for this purpose) order."

Hopefully, someone learning Japanese finds Anya's own hints helpful. I personally would love to learn Japanese, which is luckily a language my community college offers (although I won't be able to start until fall of next year, sob).