October Novel Prep Challenge

That's wonderful! Japanese is an amazing language, and it's a pleasure to learn. I'll be taking N3, which is a little frightening. There are around 1,800 vocab words for this level alone. Some of them are easy, but this test just might kill me.

I'm not familiar with that method. :) I'm self-taught, so I used internet resources to learn hiragana, katakana, grammar, and sentence structure, and Japanese books to practice reading comprehension. Now I'm living in Northern Japan, so I'm improving my speaking skills little by little.

I'm such an awful test-taker, though. >_<;;

If you want to mix up your learning methods, I'd recommend buying a novel or a simple comic in Japanese. Especially for writers and visual learners, associating vocabulary words with a story makes them so much more memorable, and you get more exposure to conversational Japanese. Even know, I remember the exact moment in a story where I first encountered many words, and I'll never forget them.

Kanji seem difficult, but they can be wonderful. Once you know some kanji, words will start opening themselves up to you. Even if you don't know how to pronounce a compound, you can understand the meaning because of the kanji that comprise it. 火山 (かざん), for example, is composed of the simple kanji "fire" and "mountain." It comes as no surprise that the word's meaning is "volcano."

I absolutely love studying Japanese. If you ever have a question, don't hesitate to send it my way, and I'll do my best to answer it if I can.

Have fun! There are some great online resources for vocab and grammar learning, too, and some free flashcard programs you can download.