Hiragana Conquered, Anki Aid, and Kanji Heaven

Hiragana is mine. Just finished the last 36 this evening. I can now slowly and clumsily pronounce Japanese script. Feels good man. Granted, it's purely recognition-based, meaning I can see あ　or ほ and tell you what it says, but going the other way is much sketchier. Writing out the kana ("fifty f*cking times!!" ~Namasensei) is going to help with that. Now I just need to review hiragana once, maybe twice a day. That's like, two, five minutes tops. Means I have much more time to devote to....katakana. Another wall, but this one will go down much faster than hiragana - or at least with less effort. I hope. Anyway, I think I'll have all the kana learned by next Friday easy, thanks to realkana. Seriously that online app was a godsend. I've only beaten hiragana on easy mode (hard mode uses all the different scripts which even now makes me want to tear my hair out), but this is an accomplishment and I am pleased as punch. 

Anki is similarly a godsend. I finally learned how to edit/merge/sort decks, and combined with the new ability to (kind of) read Japanese script, I am going to absolutely devour vocabulary. Learning six thousand words and three thousand kanji suddenly doesn't seem as impossible as it did three days ago. I can already recognize 107 hiragana characters, about twenty or thirty kanji, and about forty or even fifty words, depending on how my decks treat me tomorrow. 

Speaking of kanji. Oh my. It is beautiful. The way the characters build on one another and flow into one another's meanings is breathtaking at times. For example,　休、やすむ, yasumi, meaning 'rest', combines the character for 'man' with the character for 'tree.' The image of a man resting beneath the shade of a maple on a mountain climb is going to be impossible to forget, like a scene right out of Your Name. And so many of them are like that! They might still make me scream in frustration later, but this method of learning the simplest kanji first, learning the radicals, and then seeing how those unfold into more elaborate characters is going to be a wild, thrilling voyage. I can't wait. 

Onto katakana, more vocabulary, and more kanji. After I have conquered the kana I can start the grammar study. I'll say I won't begin Tae Kim till next Friday, but I'm hopeful it will take much less time than that.