Japanese punctuation

Well it's nice to be finally back. I just came back from a boot camp based off of Army Basic Training for 6 weeks. My family and I have decided awhile ago that we are going to Tokyo, Japan in 1 year. Right now I am a junior in high school, when I graduate as a senior in a year, we will be flying to tokyo using our time share plan.

I've always liked japan for their technological advances. It's true that they are 2 years ahead of the highest technology right now in New York. Today I was at a store called Hastings and I saw many things. I saw some weird candy that looked like a pocky stick with a chocolate mushroom on top. It had an arrow on the package pointing to the inside of the biscuit stick which seemed to be porus like bone marrow. EVERYTHING on it was in japanese, including the ingredients, etc. Which surprised me... I wanted to buy it but didn't quite have enough to.

To the point, I already have a few japanese programs that are basically worthless. One is called Jump Start japanese but it totally lacks teaching ability. It doesn't even mention kanji.. which is vital in learning japanese. So I'm going to research and learn as much as I can before I leave to tokyo in a year. I already know a bit about the culture, but like most gaiji; kanji is a real difficult for me. Especially knowing the difference between the two types of kanji and how they interact between the kana. I also noticed a new (punctuation?) interesting mark. It looks like "~". I have no clue which this means.. possibly it could be used as emphasis like it is in english..



Also here's a funny/interesting flash video on "How to fold a shirt", although I have no idea what the lady is saying. Perhaps someone could translate it
I'd appreciate that much.

How to Fold a Shirt

~ isn't puntuation, its just a 'slang' thing for extending the sounds, ah~ means a long ah sound.

Kanji isnt important at the beginer level. It just complicates things, its more important to have a firm grasp of how hiragana and katakana work and how to spell properly. And basic grammar

I don't know... I memorized the kana first, but I've been working on my kanji as much as possible. And, while I am taking things very slow and could probably be much better in spoken Japanese if I only dealt with kana and romaji for the time being, I think I have a better understanding of what I do know because of my kanji. Everyone learns differently, though. If you want to try kanji as well right away, though, try the book, Essential Kanji for your kanji studies. I tried quite a few other kanji books, and this is the one I liked the best. For grammar and stuff I use the Japanese for Busy People I (Kana Version).

Ewok's right though--even if you do start with kanji from almost the beginning, take two weeks to get through the kana first. (That's how long it took me for both syllabaries, I think it's about an average time.)

If you are still using romaji, you have no reason to be doing kanji. Forget kanji even exists until you can write kana perfectly whilst hanging upside down over a pool of hungry crocodiles.

Then grammar. Its nice knowing a bunch of words but unless you can get them into a coherant order they are nothing but sounds.

The kanji book I use also gives proper use examples, although not many. Learning both is working best for me, rather than one and then the other.

i have the cards and stuff i am up to 39 not much though

I still think learning kanji is going to hobble your early progress, theres so many other things you can do before hand that would make picking up kanji so much easier. If you know the basics (kana, grammar, vocab, etc) then adding in kanji is not a challenge, it just happens.