Kanji no kizu!

During this, my week of unemployed boredom, I have decided to teach myself to learn Japanese. Bored, yes; unsatiable thirst for knowledge, perhaps; suicidal tendancies, most definitely. Today I dedicated 4 hours to learning 20 hiragana characters; this is less than half of the basic characters of the first syllabic alphabet. Once I master the 46 basic characters (unvoiced) of hiragana, I'll still have the basic voiced, compound unvoiced, and compound voiced.. oh yeah, and a few pesky irregular tendencies some of those characters have. And then? Then I'll learn katakana - the second syllabic alphabet. And then? If my head is still intact, I'll start learning kanji, which has no ties to either alphabet but is rather a pictographic symbology of everything under the sun! Of course, at some point I'm going to have to actually learn the language so that I can understand what on earth I'm writing/reading. But I guess I'll worry about that later. :)

Be sure to check out the link above (click on this post's title) - it's my internet-sensei. Absolutely wonderful site. Speaking of wonderful, aren't the characters beautiful?! I have 5 pages of hiragana characters - my favorites are "ki", "so", "to", and "a".

What can I say? Caligraphy in English is fun, but Japanese is just awesome!