Gangis's Journal: Dum de dum...

I didn't get the job with BCC. They passed it over to some girl who claims to "really need the money." I don't know her story, but oh well, such is life...

You know, I've been into this anime called Full Moon wo Sagashite. I really like it, it's about a young girl named Mitsuki who was diagnosed with throat cancer and she was visited by a couple of the Shinigami (angels of death) and was informed that she'd have until next Spring to live. She said her dream was to become a big-time singer. Meroko and Takuto (the Shinigami) grant her the wish, and she turns into a 16 year old J-Pop singer by the name of Full Moon. It's really great and heartwarming. I think my favorite character besides the obvious 3 (Mitsuki, Meroko and Takuto) is Ooshige Masami. She's really nutty! She reminds me of Miyazawa Yukino from Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou (His and Her Circumstances.)

I've been giving my friends advice on learning Japanese, advice that I've passed over from fluent speakers of the language. For the sake of simplicity and out of the goodness of my heart, I'll repeat it here. ^_^ BTW, if you can't read the Japanese text, right click the browser window and go down to Encoding and select either "Japanese (Auto-Select)" or "Unicode (UTF-8)".

Learn the basic grammar first. I have a really good book, but I seem to have misplaced it so I can't give you the ISBN number. It's a tiny red book with "Japanese Grammar" written on it, I think published by Barron. I highly recommend it.

Learn Hiragana (ÐçÈjafter learning the grammar. I cannot stress this enough. You will definitely want to learn it first, since that's the real foundation of the writing system.

After you've learned and are comfortable with Hiragana, learn Katakana (fJf^fJfi) as soon as possible! Katakana is very important, it is used for "loan" words as well as foreign words.

After you've mastered both Hiragana and Katakana, you have only one choice... Kanji (SZs). Kanji is very extensive and will take years to even learn the 1,945 characters required to graduate from High School in Japan. To make your life easier with Kanji, I recommend this book: Kanji and Kana: Revised Edition by the Tuttle Language Library. The ISBN number is 0-8048-2077-5. I highly recommend it. The book also has some information on Hiragana and Katakana.

Well, I guess that's that. Until next time! ^_^