Ok, let’s learn some Kanji today! You’ll see that it’s not so scary!

口【くち】 – mouth
Just picture an open mouth except um… more square. This box shows up ALL THE TIME in Kanji so MAKE SURE you get the correct stroke order.

五【ご】 – five
I guess it kind of looks like 5 with a line on the bottom

日【ひ】- sun; day
Similar to mouth, it’s a circle made into a square with a line in the middle to represent sun rays or something.

木【き】 – tree
Pretty much exactly how I would draw a tree (my drawing skills are terrible)

本【ほん】 – root; book
The Kanji itself means root. As you can see it’s a tree with a line on the trunk bottom to emphasis a root. It’s also the word for book as in “books are the root of all knowledge”. Quaint, ain’t it?

日本【に・ほん】 – Japan
Root of the sun, you know, the “Land of the Rising Sun”? It would be pretty hot over there if it were really the case.

言う【い・う】 – to say
言 is like four lines of dialogue or sound waves on top of a mouth (notice the first top stroke is slanted). Easy!

語【ご】 – language
Combine the radicals for “say”, “five” and “mouth” and you get the single character for language. To say with five mouths, I guess it kinda makes sense. It’s not a word by itself but you can just tack it onto countries to describe that country’s language such as スペイン語 = Spanish. Cool!

日本語【に・ほん・ご】 – Japanese (language)
Just tack on the character for language to the word for Japan to get Japanese as mentioned above.

Ok, let’s make a sentence with KANJI!

これは日本語でなんと言いますか？
What is this called in Japanese?
lit: As for this, what do you say in Japanese?

Replace これ with whatever you want to know the Japanese word for.

Hopefully this will give you an idea of how to make up mnemonics for memorizing Kanji.

MAKE SURE to practice after checking the stroke order which you can see here:
http://jisho.org/kanji/details/口五日木本言語

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I’ve now created a facebook group to connect with other Japanese learners.

My facebook group for learning Japanese

Not sure what I’m going to do with it. I’m just playing around with the idea.

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http://www.facebook.com/taekimjapanese

いまさらですけど、暇つぶしにFacebookのアカウントを作りました。何に使うかさっぱりですので、今のところ、なんにもないですよ。

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Also, Bing seems to be pretty much exactly the same as Yahoo now.

Lame.

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What I haven’t mention yet is that each word I pick is a word I just learned personally. Usually, I pick a word from my dictionary history, which has things I looked up recently while reading books or listening to podcasts and then search around for something online that uses that word. It’s actually more for myself than anything as it allows me to review a word I just learned in a different context. At first, it annoyed me that I couldn’t just add a bunch and schedule them to appear later on twitter. But it’s actually helping me to memorize the word because it may be a few days after I learned it that I actually post it. As fans of SRS know, it’s best to not think about a word for a while before conjuring it up again.

If you’d like to try your own WOTD on twitter, post a link to your account in the comments so I can follow you. Don’t just post the word though (which is same as looking it up in the dictionary). Try to find a sentence that uses the word and post a link to the source.

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1. Working on improving my vocabulary and writing (on lang-8) in Japanese
2. Japanese from scratch youtube videos
3. The Complete Guide to Japanese
4. Adding vocab lists to the Grammar guide to make it ebook friendly
5. Learning Chinese (not really)
6. This blog

I also just started posting WOTD (Word of the Day) on my twitter account.

https://twitter.com/#!/kimchi314

My free time is limited so many of these projects inevitably get neglected sometimes. But I like to jump around and work on different things to keep things interesting for myself. After all, it is my hobby and primarily for my personal enjoyment.

I’d like to figure out why my website ranks so low when you do a search for “learn Japanese” on various search engines. My website is WAY better than many of the sites on the first page of the search results. Anybody have some good SEO tips?

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I know I keep saying we’re done with Hiragana only to have another lesson with more sounds in Hiragana. Well, we’re almost done with learning all the sounds in Hiragana. In this lesson, we’re going to learn how to attach a /y/ vowel sound to another consonant and how to make a double consonant sound. Once more lesson after this, and we will be done with Hiragana!

Reading Practice

Here’s a list of random vocabulary you should read over for some simple reading practice. Once again, don’t worry about memorizing the definitions.

1. いしゃ – doctor
2. おちゃ – tea
3. りょくちゃ – green tea
4. にんじゃ – ninja
5. しゅと – capital (city)
6. しゃしん – photograph
7. まっちゃ – (ceremonial) green tea
8. しっぽ – tail
9. じゃっかん – slightly
10. ざっし – magazine
11. もっと – more
12. けっちゃく – conclusion

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（僕にとって）世界一かわいい赤ちゃんの大冒険：伝説の珍獣に遭遇！

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