Learning Japanese II

This was some 2 months ago:

I have finally internalised the number system and don’t need to translate it in my head. I normally take this as a good process. Before this, I would have to translate each number painfully into English (or Chinese) first before I could understand it. This movement signifies that the language jump has suceeded and learning should be easier going forward. So now, I will know how much a store keeper is telling me and fork out the correct amount, without having to look at the figures at the cash register.

Secondly, I am also able to read Kanji and the Kanas (japanese characters) directly and understand them without having to visualise them into alphabets in my head first. That was a painful legacy and problem from starting to learn Japanese using Romanji, hence I would advise extreme caution against doing so.

Actually its still a bit tougher for me to recognise Katakana as a lot of them looked similar to me and the brain has not wired up properly yet. The curly Hiragana are more distinct and its also the first set of scripts that I picked up.

Finally, I think my Chinese reading may actually have improved. However, I must say that I probably know more of how to pronunce a Chinese character (Kanji) as Japanese words than the Chinese prounciation!

Now the next step to learn to recognise the entire words rather than have to read each character to recognise the word, just like how we recognise word in English.

This is now:
I can now read Hiragana fluently and also read the Kanji correctly together in sentences. What used to take a while to read one page in my text book, now I can read them in much less time. Also, I am beginning to recognise words, so I am reading words instead of individual characters. With this, I can read text faster as it goes.

I still have problem with speaking as I lack the more advanced grammar to express ideas and thoughts, so I am only speaking in relatively short and simple sentence at the moment still.