Learning Japanese, part 2

As there is not a lot to do in Austria in the mountains if you don't ski, I have a lot of time to catch up on kanji and katakana.

I had to transliterate this from hiragana to the proper katakana and kanji:

Here is the translation: "There are four avocados, eight papayas, one melon, nine kiwis, five lemons, three limes, ten oranges, seven pineapples, two mangos and six passionfruits."

That is going to become one strange fruit salad ;)

Learning Japanese, part 1

This is what I see when I take a break from my daily chores, sitting on my sofa:

I can read Hiragana quite well, Katakana almost as well. But when I have to write Katakana, I sometimes have to think hard about a character, to the point of having to look it up.

I want to replace these posters soon with posters of the 30-something kanji I should have learned up to now.

I have been doing Japanese lessons once a week since end of last summer. Prior to that, I used Rosetta Stone (language learning software), which I think is quite good :)

Our sensei gave us a lot of shukudai (homework) over the Christmas break. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to do it all. When the lessons resumed, I told my sensei that I didn't have enough time to do all the homework because I had been cooking so many Japanese dishes.

She said: "Really? What did you cook?" and when I said "Kiriboshi daikon... hijiki no nimono...", she made a face and shook herself ;)

(to be continued)