Learning hiragana is difficult | Blog post #2

About three weeks have passed since we started the semester. Learning Japanese so far has certainly been a challenge, but the feeling of being able to read more characters and understand their meanings is so satisfying! Sometimes, I'm intimidated by how good all of my other classmates seem to be at reading hiragana. However, it's okay! I remember when I first started learning Spanish, and I always kept asking myself, "When is it all just going to click? When am I going to be fluent?" Learning a new language takes a lot of patience, so I will keep this in mind as I continue to study Japanese. It's difficult since it's an entirely new writing system that I have never studied before, so I have to put a lot of extra work into it.

I didn't know that Japanese has three writing systems, so I can't imagine how much more difficult katakana and kanji will be. I have been studying hiragana almost every day now, if only for fifteen minutes at a time. I think I struggle the most with characters that are printed and handwritten differently. It's a concept I'm not that familiar with since English doesn't do that. Well, I suppose we do have cursive handwriting, and then there are also capital and lower-case letters, so perhaps that is difficult for those learning English not as their mother tongue.

Besides that, I'm trying to listen to more J-pop to get my ears more accustomed to Japanese. I've been going on Spotify and listening to Japan's Top 50 chart to see what's popular now over there. I really like this artist named Aimyon. She's cool and has a nice voice. Additionally, I have been watching more anime for similar purposes. I just finished watching Hi-score Girl on Netflix. It's about this young boy who is really good at playing video games, and then this girl beats him playing a fighting game. She ends up being naturally awesome at playing video games, so they become rivals but also friends. It's really cute and super funny. I recommend it! I hope one day I'll be able to watch anime without any subtitles.