こんにちは！
Today, I'm going to start writting about learning first steps. I'll show you where to start learning this wonderfull language and will point to few great learning tools that focus on kana. Why kana? You might think, that all you really need to learn speaking japanese is "romaji" - romanized japanese written in "our" letters (for example, first line of this blog, which is written in hiragana would be "konnichiwa" (greeting used as "good afternoon") in romaji).
Well, while it looks nice and all on first sight, it actually isn't. First of all, it's hard to find anything decent to learn from in romaji, you'll end up knowing few basic phrases and learning kana and kanji anyway~
Also, have you ever seen japanese writting in romaji? If you'll ever talk with anyone in japanese via internet, it certainly won't be romaji.
So, leaving Kanji aside, everyone should start with learning hiragana and katakana. First one should be getting higher piority as it's much more common than katakana. You can either learn hiragana first and katakana later (that's how I did stuff and how most of the sites tell you to do) or you can go and learn both at once. I'd personally suggest first method as after mastering hiragana, learning katakana will be way easier.
I won't dig into details such as "how writting in japanese works", "how was hiragana created" (although this one is kinda interesting) etc etc... instead, I'll start off by linking to one of my favorite hiragana and katakana charts.
My favorite hiragana chart comes from one of the best japanese learning websites I've seen so far - textfugu.com
http://www.textfugu.com/downloads/free/hiragana-chart.pdf
I highly suggest going over at least free part of this website, it's full of awesome informations that will get usefull along the way.
This website also features awesome multi-os software called
Anki which is one of the best tools I've found so far, usefull not only in learninf japanese, but in learning in general. I'm not gonna dig into details on this matter as you will find everything (and more) on textfugu.com (no, I don't get any money for advertising them :D that site is just plain great)
I don't really have katakana chart, as I've learned all of it from some sort of applications (Anki, and few others I'll mention later), but if you really want some sort of chart, you can try on this polish website, it's aviable together with audio and drawing animation!
http://japonka.pl/mod/resource/view.php?id=6
(You'll have to press "Zaloguj się jako gość" to access it though)
Ok, for the next thing, android stuff, to be honest, my education on PC limits to textfugu and anki atm, all the stuff centers on my Android smartphone. I have no clue about iOS apps so sorry but I can't help with that~
First thing I'd recommend is app called "Human Japanese". There are 2 versions, free and paid (which is VERY cheap btw), even the free version covers quite a lot, but I highly suggest buying full version, cuz it's very cheap and very decent.
Next 2 apps are ofcourse Anki Droid and AWESOME dictionary called simply "JED".
Now, 2 apps which are very simple, yet VERY effective - "Hiragana Learn Experiment" and "Katakana Learn Experiment". They will help you quickly learn to recognize, read and write both hiragana and katakana.
Other usefull apps are:
-JA Sensei (if I remember correctly this one installs dictionary database needed for JED)
-Narita City
That's it for kana apps, there is one more, which I count as "extra"
Super moe calculator which reads everything you do in japanese - DENTAKU Girl! Be carefull, once you install this one, you might end up not wanting to leave phone for hours!
That'll be it for today's update, I'm pretty sure I forgot about something but well~
I'll add it later if I remind myself of it :P
