re-evaluate, how to learn Japanese part 2

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I've been meaning to metion this a while since my Japanese Resources blog- there are many websites I like to quiz myself on. I've been neglectful of my books lately as many people don't recommened them, but my argument is that I need them to build up my vocabulary and understand the sentence structure, and since I didn't have a teacher to teach me in the beginning.

But when I do recognise a word from a Manga film or a vlog- it is pretty rewarding as it came from my own work.

Remembering the alphabet

The first website is Easy Japanese- this is primarily just to learn the Katakana and Hiragana alphabet, it's simple and no fuss. It'll test you unlimitedly so you can go past 100 points and it'll continue, so it's very basic but I like its unfussiness.

Through this I have basically learned hiragana, but most people, I still struggle with katakana but I'm going to talk about that later.

http://www.easyjapanese.org/kanaquiz.html

The next one teaches and quizzes you on Japanese and it is the easiest page to look at and get a straight answer with your progress with each question you go through so you know straight away if you are right or wrong.

It splits into different catagories so you can concentrate on your strong and weak points, including verbs, dates, food and of course the alphabet. The games have been updated since I first used it but it is still easy to look at than most pages- I definitely recommened.

It gives you the option of how you would like to translate words hiragana-romiji or English-Japanese giving you a list of the words you will answer before hand which you can copy and paste

http://www.digitaldialects.com/Japanese.htm

Now for listening

This is where people tell me not to study from books, because I do it in my own time I can read in my own pace-- very slow so that alone is not good for studying, even if it has a CD included it is not useful because what we learn is very oconventional.

Unfortunately, until I met my boyfriend I had no idea the Kansai area or Osaka had its own dialect. Although it should really ahve surprised me- being on a small island such as the UK- not only does different parts have it's on accent or qualoquilation Colloquialism but four countries with four different languages. Although I'm not entirely sure if Gaelic is widely used anymore in Scotland and Ireland.

So after reading a report from the Gaijin Pot, I have decided to look for songs in karaoke style with hiragana to start with to practice reading and singing/speaking quickly in Japanese. Thankfully, although it's a relatively slow and short song- after a few turns I got the hang of it.

I started off with this little melody, although it sounds like somthing from a primary school's assembly, eventually I got into it and enjoyed it.

This girl is from Britain and I'm extremely jealous of her as she is fluent in not only Japanese but French and German- however I do sometimes put that aside and enjoy watching her videos (all in Japanese with English subtitles) in hopes of picking up a few new words.

Writing

In my everyday life I have no need to write hiragana or katakana so that's immediately where my studying starts to struggle and some characters I remember straight away other times I go 'do, I knew that one!'

So to coincide my listening to music, I now find romiji lyrics to Japanese songs I like and first go over them in hiragana as part of my pracitce- because occassionally I need to look back at my phone chart, then I go over again in katakana which has taken me hours to do just four paragraphs!

But this seems to be the most logical strategy at the moment to practice writing since the paragraphs are short and once you've learned the lyrics and how to sing it, you can sing it anywhere- just remember to learn the English translation as well!

I recommened just doing one line a day if that's all you have time for in your busy life- but you will benefit from it, already I'm starting to remember a few new Katakana.

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