It’s really cool walking around New York and now being able to read some of the Japanese signs, like the ones at the World Trade Center memorial. :) It’s like a whole new world has opened up! I do get confused sometimes when I see Chinese because so much kanji is shared between them! >.<

I’m currently at chapter 5, season 4 and it took me about 1.5 month to get this far, now progressing a bit slower because of school. I’m not very far along when it comes to learning Japanese yet, but consistency is the key, they tell me. Also studying with the Core 2k flashcards, at the 155th, and with 15-20 words a day it took me a week to get here. Memorizing the words ain’t easy though.

Hopefully someone more experienced will be able to share more :p

Best website for drilling Hiragana and Katakana into your brain.

It took me 6 weeks to learn Hiragana because my Japanese tutor was teaching me 10 characters a week and back then I purely used her resources and only learned what she taught me/wanted to learn.

For Katakana, it took me about a week because I finally realised there was such a thing as self learning and the Internet did have resources. :p

Katakana took 3 hours one afternoon just drilling repeatedly with the iKana flashcard app on my phone.

Though it took longer than that until I could read them without thinking about it, and I still have to think about Katakana sometimes simply because it’s used far less often and some of the characters are so similar (darn you ツ and シ!).

シ and ツ were never a problem for me, funny enough. The way I remember them (it’s really stupid, but it stuck) is:

シ the strokes almost lay flat on their side; since し is a reading for 死 (death), and dead people are laying down… yeah.
ツ I actually think of 津波 (tsunami); the strokes stand almost upright (but still slanty), like a giant tidal wave. :D

The problem is when you see just one of them in text like a manga or something, in a word you aren’t familiar with. Without seeing them both side by side, in some fonts it can sometimes be quite hard to tell which one it is. ツ in particular really doesn’t look so upright in some text that I’ve encountered. Or maybe it’s just me and my poor eyesight :)

It’s not like it’s a big problem, but sometimes it causes my brain to pause and think about it instead of just skimming over it and knowing what it says without thinking.