Studying without books

I'd been studying without using any form of textbook for ages and, now I've been cured of this affliction, I can tell you, it's much easier with some textual support.

When I'm bored of an evening, I do tasks on Mechanical Turk. MT is a site where you can do very simple online tasks and get paid a tiny amount of money for them. As I'm in the UK I can't get that money paid directly into my account and instead it gets credited to my Amazon balance.

Brilliant for the occasional textbook purchase.

I plumped for Japanese From Zero!

I'm really getting along with it. It's really well structured and not overly patronising. I'd already covered hiragana by the time I started with this book but if you've not, it's a great introduction. The book gradually moves from romaji to hiragana substituting more and more characters in each chapter. 

The book has a lot of writing tasks (which I don't do many of so my writing is really poor) including frameworks to help you to learn stroke order etc. Even though you don't need to know any Kanji to get through this, the book is cunningly setting you up to be able to read and write the symbols easily. 

When phrases are introduced they are written in both hiragana and Kanji/kana so you start to absorb the way in which standard Japanese is written. 

There are a whole series of these books so, if you get on with them like me, there's a path ahead of you.

Hoorah!