Learning to read and speak Japanese

For as much time as I spend exercising and reading, I spend an equal amount of time learning Japanese.  Every day, I do three things - work on my conversational Japanese with the "Learn In Your Car Japanese" audio program, I do use the Duolingo app, and I do TinyCards to learn my hiragana and katakana.

Duolingo is great app for learning Japanese.  It involves reading from the very start, so you have to learn your hiragana first, then your katakana, and then kanji.  Japanese has a couple of little rules that are difficult if you don't already know them, and Duolingo doesn't explain these.  One of the more confusing things for me was the "ha/wa" sound.  When the character for "ha" is used after "watashi", it's pronounced "wa".  Also, Duolingo doesn't explain that hiragana is used for Japanese words whereas katakana is used for non-Japanese words, and kanji are Chinese characters used to replace whole words.

Duolingo often just throws you into hearing sentences without explaining translations first, so it took some time for me to differentiate between oniisan (older brother) and onesan (older sister) until I figured it out.

It's fun though.  I do Duolingo every day in the morning, and I have a couple hundred day streak going so far.

I do Learn in Your Car Japanese on my rides home from work every day, and on the second hour of my weekend walks.  There are limitations to learning where you can't see the writing, but that's necessary if you'll be driving/walking or otherwise visually preoccupied and learning at the same time.  I've managed to build up my vocabulary to about 400 words now, with possibly the exception of a few that I've kind of forgotten.  My sentence structure is rudimentary at this point since I'm still just learning words, but I can construct simple sentences and phrases.

Tiny Cards is also really fun, and it's helped me to learn my hiragana.  I'm still shaky on some, so I'm still reviewing, but I know most of my hiragana.  Next, I'll need to learn to write.

I wish I had taken Japanese in college, but its never too late to learn, and I'm stimulating my brain at the same time!!