#learningnewlanguages

Hi guys!

I hope you’re doing awesome!

4 new words per day! One in english, one in german, one in french and one in chinese (The languages I want to improve now!)

But is a new day today!

So Let’s do this!

English      -  Smock - Blouse or loose dress

German      -  Flughafen - Airport

French       -  l'artisan - Craftsman

 Every year since high school, I try to learn a little bit more about a language other than English. I took Spanish for three years in high school and learned a bit of French when I went with my mom several years ago. For the last couple of years , my new language has been Japanese.

Japanese has been a little tricky for me because I know what I lot of things mean but I am not very good at the rules of sentence structure. However, I did learn a lot when I was preparing to Japan two years ago; flash cards in my purse with sentences and stickers were everywhere in my house, labeling what items were called in Romanji (Japanese words written with English letters). I had purchased computer programs and books so that I would be able to better understand the language and I think I was able to learn quite a bit.

So this year I decided I would learn the Japanese alphabets! I only tried to learn what the language sounded like so I never learned how to write it. Sounds like it wouldn't take too long except for the fact it's written in characters, not letters like in English. Oh, did I mention there are three of them. Three alphabets! They are called Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji and they contain a lot of the same syllables but are used for different reasons and in different ways. Japanese characters represent syllables instead of letters so I am learning an alphabet of syllables.

Luckily, I found a really great app on iTunes called Dr. Moku's Hiragana Mnemonics. It made learning the characters very easy and I'm happy to say I have Hiragana down very well. But Hiragana is the easiest of the three so we will see how well I do with the other two. I also paired up my learning with a workbook to teach me how to write it. The order in which you start writing the character is important to its structure so I felt I should learn the right way. So far, I think I am doing well.