learning Japanese 

finished hiragana 1 and 2 before bed, 3 and 4 just now after waking up

that's all the hiragana skills on duolingo x.x that was a lot

i'm gonna cool off on it for now, come by later and do some practices

dunno if i should forge ahead on the intro lessons tonight? probably going too fast

learning Japanese 

made myself a hiragana and katakana chart to help memorize characters computerfairi.es/media/tByBdfY

learning Japanese 

i think i'm close to being able to read all hiragana without looking it up, still haven't made much of an effort with katakana

meanwhile duolingo makes zero effort to teach you grammar and any actual language beyond forced memorization

learning Japanese 

@squirrel this is why I've always avoided duolingo - it's not at all effective at teaching language

The best way to learn (that we know about): learn how to construct your own sentences

for Japanese, I know that

X wa doko des ka?

is "Where is the X?"

so by practicing that with a few nouns, I was iable to ask where things were when I visited japan

it's distinct from stock phrases because you're focusing on constructing your own sentences (which is... the point of language)

learning Japanese 

@lizardsquid yeah i figure so, but i don't have any source of what "wa" or "doko" are

i've learnt from intuition "desu" at the end of a sentence is a particle for "is" and "ka" indicates a question but that's about it

learning Japanese 

@lizardsquid and textbooks don't help me because reading is absolutely useless for me

if i want to actually learn japanese i'll probably end up having to pay a tutor because i can't learn from books

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learning Japanese 

@squirrel learning languages from text is incredibly difficult, it's way way easier to learn by speaking and listening

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