ようこそ! First little pointer: こんにちは is usually written in kana, not kanji (if for no other reason than because 今日 is more often read as きょう). =P Also, I’d write Corey as コーリー, personally. コリー sounds like “Corrie”.

Where in Australia are you from? Sydney, here.

Aye, I have a similar problem – when people are speaking to me in Japanese, my brain just switches off.

Good luck with learning. I suspect being able to communicate would certainly help with running a business. =)

Where in Osaka? Do you have the opportunity to travel around at all?

The location of the cherry blossom front is fairly easy to predict, so make sure you check the forecast to see where it’s going to be while you’re there. =)

Welcome!

I agree – it’s good enough for now. Considering (based on the information in your post) you’re at least twelve, that means you’ve had minimum eight to ten years to become familiar with English. You’ve been working at hiragana for what, a month? Give it time. =P I have to admit, I’ve been at it two years, and it’s still a struggle to read a solid paragraph of hiragana. Kanji, however, makes it much easier.

Also, tell us about your holiday. Where are you going? Will you be keeping a travel blog? Are you going to show us lots of photos? =P

I think most people give up learning on/kun readings once they figure out that the rules regarding the usage of on/kun barely can be called rules.

Even so, knowing the readings means you can make an educated guess when presented with a completely new word.

M.A.L. wrote:

Greetings to whomever cares to even look at this! I just had a question about the Hiragana chart. On it there is the one kana, ri, that is like so in the chart ( couldn’t find the way it is in the chart other than in the chart itself): http://www.textfugu.com/resources/hiragana-chart/ Is the one in there a brush stroke, because everything else looks like this kana: り. And it looks like that in the Katakana chart as well, so are they the same?

It’s fonts. Several hiragana characters look different when written by hand as opposed to printed on the screen – り and そ, as vanandrew mentioned, but also ふ, む, さ and き.

And also, does the “combo hiragana” section have a real name in Japanese (you know what I mean)? I know Koichi said that he’d just name it that for the chart, but I’d like to know if it’s possible.

拗音 (ようおん). The technical English name is “digraphs”.

And finally, in the ‘jya, jyu, and jyo’ section, are they, well, wrong? I see in the Anki program that it’s ‘ja, ju, and jo.’ Is the Anki deck Koichi provided right, or is the chart? And if there’s anything else wrong on the chart?

It’s not wrong, just different romanisation. Ja/ju/jo is the spelling currently recognised by the Japanese government, but it was jya/jyu/jyo until fairly recently (can’t work out exactly how recently, though) and some people still use that. It’s still pronounced the same (i.e. ji+ya, etc, squished into one syllable).

Welcome! They say the three hardest languages to learn in the world are English, Japanese and Arabic, so good luck with that. On the plus side, you’ve already managed English. =P

For books that are good to read, I’ve been studying using Japanese for Busy People, and also reading the Dictionary of (Basic/Intermediate/Advaced) Japanese Grammar from cover to cover. Still in the middle of Intermediate, though. Another idea for when you start to get more proficient is to just get a light novel or manga or children’s book, and read that.

As for kanji, counting what’s on this page gives me 399. Plus an ellipsis – not too sure what that’s supposed to represent.

I wouldn’t rely too much on recordings to differentiate between M-sounds and N-sounds. ん is usually closer to N, except when it’s before ば-, ぱ- and ま-line characters, in which case it’s pronounced M. (For example, せんぱい = “sempai” ish) Wikipedia adds that it’s pronounced like “[ɴ] (at the end of utterances)” but I don’t know enough about phonetics to say what that actually sounds like.