We all want to learn things so we can do them, right? For some it's learning how to cook. For others it's learning how to get through school life. I had one of these ambitions! It was to learn Japanese!

I was first exposed to Japanese by raw scans of Fruits Basket. I would look at them and have absolutely no clue what was being said. Then I wanted to know what was being said (simple enough...).

I started with basics. I taught myself the hiragana and the katakana, the two sound systems of the language. (What I can explain them as.) I put the sound by the ones in the scans and did it enough to memorize them all.

Then there was the Kanji...They were no problem for me, as long as they had hiragana beside them. If they didn't...I couldn't read it. I would ask myself, "How do people learn Kanji anyway? Do they really memorize them? Wow...Japanese students have it hard..."  So when kanji came up I just turned to online translations.

One thing that always confused me was (and still does) the Japanese grammar! The first translated chapter I ever attemped was Special A chapter 42. I kind of understood the grammar, but the translations still sounded cheesey and simple-sentenced. I knew then and there that I needed to study up on grammar! I needed to know what the heck the "ga, ni, wa, no, and e" meant in sentences. I needed to know what this "te" form was. What were past , present, and future tenses of words? So many questions were not truly acted upon until just recently! I checked out an Easy Japanese book and read through the whole thing. Now I have a much bigger understanding of Japanese Grammar and I'm so happy~!

Lastly, I will return to Kanji. My question of how people learned Kanji or looked them up in dictionaries was answered just recently too. I looked through a Kanji dictionary and asked, "How do I use this dictionary?!" After careful inspection, I found out that after you learn how, it's so simple! There are things that identify Kanji, which are called radicals. There are 214 radicals in all. You identify them by radicals on the left, the right, the bottom, the top, or all of it. It was so simple...and I had just learned it!

So with my new understanding of Japanese, I started doing full translations of Special A, starting from chapter 52. (I have yet to post them on my SA group...but I will post it, I promise to any member of that group that may be reading this!)

So now I have a message for you that want to learn. Unless you have a hard time learning, it's very possible to learn Japanese without a tutor. It helps to have a tutor though. Learning all by myself has taken a year and a half  to understand as much as I do now. If you get right on it and read about it right on, then it could take you less time. (And also to those who complain about not getting translations of your fav. series, DON"T. I now understand how much time it takes to translate a chapter and type it up.)