Work sucks.... up all my free time

Ok, so work doesn't necessarily "Suck" per-say. Kinda hard to hate work when you work from home. But it does suck up a lot of my free time. For those of you that didn't already know (if anyone even reads this blog anymore that is), I've started working for a company called Preferred Interactive. Basically they run a website for contractors that allows their customers to chose what they want in their house before it's built and see how it would look with those features before it's even built. The concept is kind of along the lines of the 3D home walk-through, but with easier controls since you're only editing one room at a time. Anyway, kinda going off topic here now, so back to the point of this blog.

As I was saying, work's been sucking up my free time, so it's made it hard to study my ひらがな(Hiragana). As a result; instead of being done with learning the ひらがな "alphabet" (I say alphabet in quotes cause they're actually syllabifies), I've only learned the "alphabet" from あ(a) to ほ (ho). This leaves about 2 more columns of standard ひらがな to learn, followed by all the だくてん　(Dakuten) which look like standard ひらがな but have a little quotation or circle to change their sound (the first character in だくてん is a Dakuten; the " change a Ta sound to Da sound for example).

So anyway, my studies right now are slow; but as I get quicker at my job and start getting some extra income, I'll be able to study more, and hopefully purchase access to the more advanced studies that actually teach you how to speak in proper Japanese sentences, as well as the other 2 "alphabets" かたかな (katakana) and かんじ(kanji).

That's all for now though; time for me to get go work. Two projects due by tomorrow morning, with 2 more possibly coming in later today. さよなら

I'm baaaack!

So kinda changing the topic, and didn't really feel like making a new blog for it. A few days ago, I found an awesome site for learning 日本語 (Japanese)! Ok, so I cheated on that one... I haven't learned Kanji yet, I'm still on Hiragana. Anyway, the site is called Textfugu.com. There's an interesting story behind how it came to be, and the person who made it is pure genius when it comes to teaching Japanese; or at least I think so. I tried learning Japanese on my own a while back, but was unsuccessful since A) I didn't really have any one to study it with/for B) I didn't know HOW to study it and C) I was letting myself get overwhelmed by it too easily. Well, all that was solved when I found Textfugu.

In the first 5 hours I felt like I had learned more than I had in the previous 2-3 years. And to top it off, I'm actually learning to read Japanese before I can understand it... the opposite of how I was doing it before. The benefit I do see from my previous attempts is, I can now type at least some words in Hiragana instead of Romaji. So to those that are checking out my blog こんにちは　みんな！