Learning Japanese

Yesterday, I had my first class in Japanese. The teacher kept assuring us, "see, Japanese is easy!" And certainly it seems to be so as a spoken language. Learning the writing system though has me more than a little intimidated. * Stares fretfully at the 46 hiragana syllables*. And then there's thousands of Kanji to learn as well (though fortunately you only need a few hundred to be able to read most of a typical Japanese newspaper). And my penmanship sucks, so this will definitely be a challenge.

My first sentences using the romanized characters: Konnichiwa. Watachi wa Jennifer desu. Kanada-jin desu. Hajimemashite. (Hello. I'm Jennifer. I'm Canadian. How do you do?) Yeah, we didn't get very far, focussing on pronunciation of the basic syllables. Now I have to practice getting my tongue around some of the longer words. Oyasuminasai. (good night.)