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Believe it or not, working with the Doll Coordinate Recipe mooks has inspired me to learn Japanese! It is a very slow process for me. So far, I have managed to memorize the Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries (kinda like phonetic alphabets). I am so happy to be able to read the TITLES of the DCR mooks now. Woo hoo! Sounds like nothing I know, but for me it is progress!
The cover of DCR4 title is in katakana. It says:
do ru ko de i ne i to re shi pi 4 => doll coordinate recipe 4
ro ma n te i -- ku ga ri ==> romantic girl(not sure what gari is?)
bu rai su, momoko do ru, ==> blythe, momoko doll
ta i ni be shi (not sure of rest ) ==> tiny betsy
(then there is some hiragana and kanji )
Whew...what a workout for the brain. I am probably not even reading at a pre-school level right now. I can read the katakana only because this "alphabet" is used for words borrowed from foreign languages such as English. So I can kind of figure out that "do ru" = "doll". But with the Hiragana, I can read the words but have no idea what they mean in Japanese. But, hey, you have to start somewhere! I'm hoping to get some speaking fluency so in the event I get to go to Japan, I can at least say and understand some basics. Like, "Where are the Blythes?" and "Where is the cute fabric shop?" ha ha ha.
I'm just studying on my own right now, so if anyone out there who has studied Japanese can recommend some good books, I'd appreciate it.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Studying Japanese (Katakana & Hiragana)
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2 comments:
All the doll books/mooks & other fantastic japanese craft books really make me want to learn Japanese too. It seems soooo hard though, I don't think I could do it!
You can do it! It is a slow process....but if you study a little each day, it adds up. Just by memorizing the katakana alphabet (46 characters) you can read titles of a lot of the DCR mooks and the names of the patterns. This is because katakana is used to write "borrowed" words from other languages such as English. I used flashcards and it took me a couple days. The other thing is to keep practicing what you've learned. It goes away really fast if you don't use it (I know that for fact!) :o)
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