need advice!!

Whitefang-san,

Konnichiwa! I'm glad you have joined Rocket Japanese for your journey in learning Japanese.

I recommend you start right at the beginning with the first Interactive Audio Lesson. As you listen to native Japanese being spoken - your ear will begin adjusting to the tone/voice of Japanese. You will then learn how to say hello, and other basic phrases. Also, check out the Language and Culture lessons where you will be introduced to Hiragana and then Katakana which will help you understand and develop you writing and readings skills. Always go at your own pace - and go back to each lesson as many times as you need to. And if you have any questions, please let me know - post it in this Forum and I'll make sure to get back to you as soon as I can. Most of all, enjoy learning!

-Sayaka

Quote from whitefang
well i already know the basics but i don't really know what to start with either kanji,hirigana or katakana? can you please tell me what would be best to start with among these three?

In order to know how to read Kanji you probably should learn hiragana, and katakana. I say "and" because really hiragana and katakana are just the same thing except "spelled" differently. If anything of the Japanese language would be considered an alphabet, it'd be hiragana and katakana. They both are characters sets that each character has no real meaning, but only describes a single sound that can be pronounced only one way. A better way to describe the difference between hiragana and katakana is that katakana is more like the italicized form of hiragana if you will. In most cases the characters resemble each other, but have a slightly different look.

Kanji is a bit more difficult and each symbol has a variety of readings and meanings that are attached to it when used in different contexts and when applied in compounds. Overall they could be considered what might be the "words" of the Japanese language.

I hope that may help guide you towards deciding which character set you'd like to start with. Most follow the order of learning Hiragana, then learning Katakana as an extension of Hiragana. From there they use HIragana and Katakana to learn how to read and understand kanji.

However, I'd like to point out your Rocket Japanese Premium grammar lessons will teach you HIragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Kanji is more thoroughly covered as you get into Premium Plus and Platinum lessons, however you learn Hiragana and Katakana as early as the first grammar lessons. Another site to check out though would be readthekanji.com, Hiragana and Katakana and the first 100 or so kanji are free to learn, but from there it becomes a subcription services.

I hope this helped,

Derek

Quote from whitefang
arigathou derek san, there is another thing i would like to ask that due to a little research i have done i have found that in kanji there are two sets of readings one is the on reading and the other is the kun reading which one of these is more commonly used or do you have to learn both of them?

They all have a variety of on and kun readings, but trying to learn to read kanji via memorizing their on and kun will not only be extremely challenging, but you won't know how to read it within different contexts. Which is why it's usually better to learn to read kanji by just practicing to read in Japanese. A good way to do this is reading online Japanese websites with Rikai-chan which is a firefox add-on that you can install. You turn it on and off by a simply right-click menu selection and whenever you hover over Japanese words/kanji/expressions the english meaning and how to read it in Hiragana and Katakana is displayed. Romaji isn't really utilized in the program. So its a very good idea to start with Hiragana and Katakana first.

Although for more information on how you should go about self-teaching yourself, the new motivation section can help you understand how to better teach yourself. You can also find some great materials in my signature.