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

made myself a hiragana and katakana chart to help memorize characters https://computerfairi.es/media/tByBdfYiqU9Kq1rVMrA

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

@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)

@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

@squirrel ah!

I actually know these

so in Japanese, we need to know when we've finished talking about the topic of the sentence

so the word "wa" just means "I've stopped talking about the topic, here's the rest of the sentence"

"doko" is just the word for "where"

so to ask "where is the train station?", we say

train station (topic marker) where is (question)

densya no eki wa doko desu ka

@lizardsquid right i actually knew "wa" i just keep forgetting you actually meant "ha" because it's pronounced "wa"