First steps

My bags are packed, my mind set, my gear stowed, my boots tied, my maps drawn out, and my mind empty. The first steps upon a new road are taken this night. I sit here listening to a preparatory song to set the mood right now, while doing as much of the "writing" writing as I am be doing tonight. As my mind empties and focuses, I decide that tonight is going to be a short night, I have an early morn and a busy day tomorrow, and the extra sleep will be helpful. Time to dive in. Open the door and take the first step down this road. My mood setting song is this if you are interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIdo4EhOidY
It is in Japanese, and the lyrics are quite interesting, and the song quite inspiring. I thought it an apt song to focus my mind and put me in the right place every night.

Step one: The four syllabaries. (alphabets)
There is: Romanji: In the website's words, it is useless. It is literally a romanized version of the Japanese characters. Things like Sushi, sake, and bento are all romanji words. Literally a Japanese word written phonetically in the roman alphabet.
     Hirigana: a poetic alphabet that is of greatest utility to those just learning Japanese, as it is the easiest to learn pronunciation from, and generally you can scrape by with just hirigana, as long as you're planning to keep learning the other "alphabets" like:
     Katakana: The syllabary used for onomatopoeia, and for words borrowed from other languages (such as the Japanese word for bread which was originally borrowed from Portuguese and french, which is why it sounds so similar to the traditional Roman "pan")
     And finally: Kanji: the biggest syllabary, with literally thousands of characters, and multiple pronunciations to each character. Apparently if one plans to study in Japan academically it is wise to know between two and a half THOUSAND and three thousand characters. Kanji was "imported" from China, and was "imported" multiple times, once from one dynasty, then again (all the same characters) from a later dynasty who had decided that some words needed a little different pronunciation. Then the Japanese themselves decided that there needed to be a "Japanese" pronunciation to some of these words as well. TextFugu apparently has a revolutionary way of teaching them so I'm not too worried. For now I will focus on what is coming up immediately next, that being step two, which I will tackle tomorrow night. The start of Hirigana.

Sorry tonight's post was so dry and short, but there was not a lot to talk about really. Personally I think Hirigana will be the most useful, because it is what the majority of Manga seems to be written with, likely with a good amount of Kanji characters hidden in there, and obviously Katakana when onomatopoeia is needed (see EVERY DANG PANEL BECAUSE THE JAPANESE FUCKING LOVE ONOMATOPOEIA! Which isn't a bad thing, if I knew what they were saying I feel like it would make it much more imersive! even professional, official released translations rarely bother to translate the onomatopoeia which is quite unfortunate in my opinion. (that and english is a little lacking in actual onomatopoeia words. Lets see how many times I can write onomatopoeia tonight! the count is: 5 times)

That's all for tonight, I will plant my foot for a second time tomorrow with step two!

~Dragon