Hiragana Progress

Another month has passed, which marks my second month of study with Japanese. Throughout the month of July, I made steady progress with the first Japanese From Zero! book. Currently, I’m on lesson five. The lesson covers a few more Hiragana characters and likes and dislikes. Out of all of the words I currently know, my favorite word is みみ (耳). It means ’ear’ and is pronounced, ‘mi-mi’. The word reminds me of the Road Runner’s, “Beep beep (Meep meep)”.

To aid memorization, I’ve been committed to Memrise. The site serves as a learning platform that primarily focuses on languages. Each day, I go through a series of flashcards, chat emulation, audio and video recordings. My only critique is that I feel the Japanese 1 course introduces Katakana and Kanji too soon. I feel there should be more of an emphasis on Hiragana prior. But that’s mainly because I want to stick with the first book, which does not cover Katakana or Kanji.

On-top of Japanese, I’ve also begun to re-learn Russian. Originally, I was against the idea. But I wanted to have a side language to study. Although Japanese will remain my top focus, I spend about thirty minutes a day using Memrise and a book titled, “Russian Course,” for practice. I considered using my college textbook but found the format to be poor with few translations. Currently, I do not find Russian to be difficult to study alongside Japanese. The two languages are quite diverse.