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Hiragana Chart ひらがな

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  I had the advantage when I came to learning Japanese that I had learned another language with a non-roman script before, although that was a long time ago in high school.  I learned Classical Greek which used the Greek alphabet.  It was in high school, so I had the support of school language classes to do it, rather than working on my own.  It enforced discipline and practice.  It was also very different in that it was an alphabet, rather than a syllabary.  Japanese is very different in that style - each symbol is a sound. When I learned to read in England, we learned the letters in alphabetical order, and had pictures of things that began with that letter, such as “a is for apple, b is for bee, c is for cat”.  That last one in particular really does not help - if you try reading it out loud, you will notice that you have just said “see is for cat”, which is a hard c or k sound.  Makes things much harder for children to grasp.  This...
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Duolingo discrepancies between furigana and audio

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Having done the correct format for dates, both months and days of the months, this week was very timely, as the Duolingo lesson today had the wrong furigana, but the correct audio (which is often a miracle - their most frequent flaw is to have the wrong audio for a symbol, particularly annoying when they show four new kanji & ask you which one is x - and you tap each of the kanji to hear the sound, and none of them is x... And it doesn't seem to mater how many times that you report that the audio is wrong, it does not get fixed). I sat there for quite a while looking at the kanji symbols with their furigana and the word pieces*, and going "nothing there sounds remotely like shiga...? shinga..? shika...? shige...?" and replaying the audio to be sure exactly which pronunciation I was hearing (since I initially assumed I must be hearing wrong, and the answer really was down there...)., and then instead of looking at the text to choose from, I just listened to the sentenc...
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Oxymoron…

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 I’m in pain after standing for an hour & a half to prep dinner.  I just finally sat down & took a pain killer with a sip of most excellent ume-shu (薬を飲んだ) & I think it must be the quality of this 梅酒, not like the usual one, but I then had a sudden realization that it was the same ending in ume-shu as it is in nihonshu…  And felt like a genius and stupid for it taking so long to realise, both at the same time… Random cat tax…
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