My Japanese studies are going well. The Japanese language has three writing systems. There is Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. You have to learn all three in order to be fluent and literate because most sentences use a combination of the three systems.

For example, while English has the Latin-Roman characters to form the sentence "How are you?," Japanese uses the three writing systems to say the same thing. It looks like this: EDIT: Gamespot does not allow Japanese characters. Here is a link to some phrases in Japanese with their English translation.

http://www.linguanaut.com/english_japanese.htm

Note: "How are you?" is the fifth phrase on the list for those who are looking to find it fast.

As long as I am writing this blog about the Japanese language, I might as well say some of what I know about it.

Kanji is actually based on Chinese characters because the Japanese people and the Ainu, the natives who lived in Japan before the people we know today migrated to the islands, had no written language. Even though Kanji and Chinese characters may be the same, they have different meanings depending on the language. Next, Hirigana is not an alphabet. It is a phonetic system based on five vowels with consonants used before the vowels. Katakana is the writing system used for non-Chinese foreign words and they are distinguishable because of that. Also, Katakana is used for formal writing like upper-case letters in English.

More information on Katakana: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/katakana

I memorized most of the kana, so now I can learn words without romaji versions. I still need to learn the meaning of the words, so I use definitions in english to understand. I also started learning kanji. A typical Japanese high school student knows about two-thousand kanji and scholars know about seven-thousand, so I have many to memorize.

In order to become aquainted with the Japanese language in use, I watch and listen to Japanese lessons I find on the internet. They help show how to move the mouth when speaking because the language is unique and not based on Latin like English which happens to be my native language. I also watch anime and listen to Japanese music. So far, it is going well and I hope my studies will continue to be fruitful.