Hi Ashley!
Why did you want to learn?
I love studying languages. After learning a bit of some European languages, I was ready for something different. Also, I live near Japantown in San Francisco, and I got more and more interested in Japanese culture and language from just walking around there a lot.
I'm still very much a beginner. I'm using LOTS of material from my library, includng audio lessons (Michel Thomas and Pimsleur) and various books, including a children's book called "I'm Learning Japanese!" that introduces the katakana and a handful of kanji along with basic sentence structure.
I'm also working through some textbooks ("Japanese for Beginners" is the one I'm using right now).
My favorite practice, though, is taking a children's book and thoroughly analyzing a sentence at a time. Combined with the other materials, it's given me a great introduction to a lot of very specific language lessons (like the use of "-kun", turning verbs into nouns using "no", and when to use contination words like "shoshite" and "keredomo"). Once I've spent the time to really understand all the components of a sentence, I nearly have it memorized - then I can recite it to myself while I'm walking down the street and write it out for writing practice.
I also use Anki for flashcard practice - it's great. I do both English/Japanese type cards ("kuma" on one side and "bear" on the other) and also cloze deletion cards from the sentences I've analyzed - it gives me good practice in filling in the correct form and correct spelling of words I've learned without any English prompts.
What was the most difficult/frustrating thing about it?
Kanji. It makes me crazy that it takes so many strokes to write a simple sound, and that there are so MANY of them, and they have different readings! Augh!
But they're also really cool and interesting.
I decided at first that I just wasn't going to learn any kanji until I really wanted to. Now I'm ready, so I'm learning a few, but with no hurry. In the meantime, I know the kana, and the library has a lot of children's books written almost entirely in kana, so I can just take it one or two at a time. This approach works well for me.
What did you enjoy most about it?
I love learning about the big and small differences between the Japanese way of expressing something and the English way. I love finding out that "unaru" - the sound a bear might make - can mean "to growl" or "to hum" (because Winnie the Pooh hums, so I think that's delightful). I like learning that you say "animal garden" to say "zoo" and that you can just stick "-mono" onto the ends of things to make a word that means "a thing you ___" (a thing you eat, a thing you drink). I especially love it when I figure something like that out for myself and then see it explained (and confirmed) in a book.
If you could recommend one thing to people wanting to learn it, what would it be?
Use whatever approach works for you. If you like manga, read manga. If you like flashcards, use flashcards. It's great to make use of as many options as you can (language exchange partner, classes if you like them, audio courses, "teach yourself" books), but pay attention to what works for you and do a lot of that.
What about you? What are your reasons for wanting to learn Japanese?
