New trick

I celebrated learning the last 8 hiragana symbols last night by learning a new trick.  I can now write hiragana in ひらがな　on the computer. That says hiragana! Hiragana is one of the writing systems used for Japanese. Unfortunately, it is rarely used on its own: it's normally used in conjuction with Katakana カタカナ　another writing system for words of foreign origin.  These two systems are relatively easy to learn.  It's a case of sitting down and memorising roughly 90 symbols and a few details on how to use them.  Things get really interesting when you start learning Kanji 寛治　which is thousands of symbols, and the system used across Japan.  I've been taking it very slowly and have only just learnt the hiragan using Let's Learn Hiragana. This is a lovely workbook which gives thorough detail on how to write the symbols and then plenty of practice for using them. You can't really learn the Japanese language using this book but there is lots of vocabulary included.

The tutorial I used for retraining my laptop was on YesJapan, a very nice website linked to a series of books that I thought I might use but only have the first one.

OK, off I go to tidy up for my sister to come and stay so we can go to our other sister's birthday drinks.  Carnage will ensue.