...

So it's not that the vocab list that I posted yesterday is the complete extent of my knowledge, because it's not, it's just that the words that go in my little book are the ones that require learning. I find that some words stick in my mind more easily than others, and so anything that goes in super easily doesn't deserve a line in my book of words (i.e. the place where I keep my five daily words... it's this really adorable miniature notebook that is perfectly spaced to hold the exact amount of information that I want for each day, and it's a flip notebook so that I can read it backwards or forwards, thus the English is on one side of the page and the Japanese on the other for easy self-testing. Hooray little books! Thank you, Amanda!).

So today's words are:

keshigomu - eraser

tokei - watch, clock

oto - sound

koko - this place, here

kinoo - yesterday

Also, I'm sure there's an easier way to get hiragana into these posts than copy and pasting from Wikipedia, but I haven't discovered it yet, so here are the hiragana characters that I've learned so far:

あ - a

い - i

う - u

え - e

お - o

か - ka

き - ki

く - ku

I think yesterday I referred to katakana by accident instead of hiragana... I keep getting them confused. These characters are definitely hiragana, though: hiragana is the writing system 'with a roundish shape', used for 'conjugation endings, function words, and native Japanese words not covered by kanji'. Oh the three different writing systems... why? Why? Mind you, it probably makes just as much (or as little) sense as the 'consistency' of English spellings.... what a maze that is for non-native speakers. 

Learning hiragana makes me feel like I'm four again, though, because when I write them, they never look the same twice. Or even close to the same, really. I feel like I'm not enough of an artist to create hiragana properly. But then, perhaps native Japanese speakers feel similarly when learning Western characters?