Complete newb to learning Japanese

[Coffeesan]

Will get a book then thanks! Any suggestions?
Also something struck me odd. In an above link I've given, there are a total of 104 characters+ "combinations"
http :// www . linguanaut . com /japanese_alphabet . htm
That link above has 108. Would you mind going through and seeing which is accurate? Or if they are b oth inaccurate? I'd like to know the full list asap. I've learned A E I O U so far, so I shall be drilling them tonight.
I won't be able to get a book until Friday and I'd like to start learning the character set.

Also for the first link I posted earlier in this thread, those combinations...the vowel always goes after a consonant, and is written in smaller font? I'm sure I'll find out why, just confirming.

Sorry to badger with questions .

Learning the vowels first is good. I have a cheap book for learning Hiragana and it basically teaches them 5 at a time it does the vowels then the ''next 5'' below on the list then the next 5 etc. I personally didnt like that method. I drilled the vowels then did the K's because I liked the look of them and then did the G's because they are identical too the K's apart from the ''Dakun'' (think thats the term) symbol on the top which converts the phonetic sound so it was a very quick short cut too learn 10 rather than 5 in one go. Going down the list in order isnt important in my opinion just pick a set which you like and learn after G's I moved onto R's as I liked the symbols and I memorized them in 1 night.

I would save the ''annoying ones'' last like wa/ha with the sentence rule... the 2 j's and 2 zu's as they are confusing at first and the symbol for n/m as that also has annoying rules too.

 

[Glenn]

For the kana you can go to Teach Yourself Japanese and run through them. There's a Java program that writes them too. You can ignore the phonetic descriptions (they get a bit technical). There are sound files that I'm assuming still work (I can't check from here). Anyway, it explains all you need to know about them, really.

The term is dakuten (濁点), by the way.

 

[chingwa]

I would highly recommend memorizing the hiragana syllabry so that you can recognize most characters fairly quickly. Then move on to a gerneralized textbook like Genki which gives you good introductory basics and then quickly moves you into beginner vocabulary and grammar. I also recommend genki because very early on it forces you to use kana over romaji letters, which imho is absolutely essential.

in fact I would tend to shy away from any materials which do have romaji, at least for a beginner. otherwise it will be hard to get anywhere as far as reading / any kind of literacy goes.

I'd also recommend getting into kanji as soon as possible (though not at the expense of kana/vocab/grammar).