Practicing Japanese

I would love to find someone interested in discussing the Japanese language from a linguistic perspective, but I'm happy with any real conversation practice. I'd estimate that I'm at a roughly intermediate level. 日本語の言語学的な事を話し合う興味がある者に出会いたいけど、会話の練習までも喜びです。 中級ぐらいに分かると思います。

Just to give people heads up, I have a difficult time reading the language now. No practice in 3 years. I can give pointers on pronounciation and conversation. It also looks like a lot of people here are on different levels. We should probably each pair up with someone who is more advanced to keep things from getting too crazy.

Angelface, to be honest I still have to use JWPce to look up words all the time. My kanji reading comprehension is not what it once was, though I'm trying to get it back there. ^^ I have a fairly good grasp of grammar, it's vocabulary that I'm always missing.

From my own experiences learning the language, I would recommend mastering hiragana and katakana before trying to get too far with anything else. The way I did this was by forcing myself to write the kana charts over and over again--first by copying them onto scrap paper, and eventually weaning myself off of looking at the charts. That helps burn them into your memory by sight as well as teaching you how to write. I would do this whenever I had free time, and I carried a little notebook around to do it in or to write down new words and phrases I learned. Once you can sight-read kana, the entire language opens up to you and so many things make a lot more sense.

http://www.japanese-lesson.com/characters/hiragana/hiragana_writing.html http://www.japanese-lesson.com/characters/katakana/katakana_writing.html You can download and print out these sheets to practice on to get started, so that you learn the correct stroke order.