Smashboards

日本語は二年間も勉強してきた。今はいいけど完璧というにはまだ時間がたっぷりかかりそうｗ
わからないことは英語で説明してほしいなら構わない。

AHHHHH.

That was terribly difficult.

I just started learning japanese on my own 2 days ago. I've only mastered hirigana and some basic phrases (which is why I've been writing only in Hirigana.)

I had to google most of your comment hahaha.

Did you self-study or was it apart of a school course?

I bought textbooks and taught myself. I think it's much more efficient than taking lessons.

You should totally penpal with me so I can keep my teachings fresh in my mind. <3

My wife is currently learning Kanji. She doesnt have a 100% mastery of katakana tho.

Im focusing on Katakana atm.

Haha, I don't see why not, but someone who speaks it natively would be so much better than me.

She really should get a hang of both kana before moving onto kanji. It's not like spending more time on 46 characters is really going to impact your study of 2000 more complicated characters all that much.

I actually have a native japanese friend who is apart of my team for PSO2 and I've been talking with him as well.

I have no desire to learn Kanji. It's so ****ing intimidating.

It's literally a system that allows you to make up your own words practically, and assign different meanings to the same word with different radicals.

**** sux ;_;

It's not really a system, as you can't really stick whatever kanji together and expect people to understand you. You can't make your own either for the same reasons. Though it happens, especially in light novels, but light novels are a strange world.

If you intend on having a functional japanese on any level you're going to need to learn the kanji. It's essential for reading and retaining the meanings of different homophones. It's intimidating, but until you can read a fair amount of stuff comfortably (~1000 kanji) you can rely on furigana to tell you how to read words or characters.

Of course, the older the target audience for what you're reading, the less furigana you'll find, but there's plenty of interesting stuff out there written for all ages, some manga, some novels.

There is a system to how to read kanji and deduce their meanings based on the radicals which can help a lot in retaining the information, but you also have to understand it's pretty loose and you just have to accept some stuff.