Well Mark, I started out with the most basic course (after katakana and hiragana) which they called “core 1000″, but when they switched over to iknow, they had a tool that was supposed to tell me where the best place to start, and that turned out to be core 2000… so under core 2000 I completed steps 1 and 2 and I’m supposed to be about 60% of the way through step 3 at the moment.

As for learning Hiragana and Katakana, all I did was take one set at a time （はひふへほ for example) and concentrate on that one set for a week… I moved through each set in a little more than a month since learning the basic “50″ was the hard part, and all the combinations (ちゃ　ちょ　ちゅ　etc) were really easy by that point.

Oh and if you learn better through videos, there’s a guy who primarily uses his youtube channel to teach how to play Shogi (maybe one day, not now though) http://www.youtube.com/user/HIDETCHI … look for his “how to read japanese” lessons…

Oh and about the head honcho thing… I learned that from tofugu.com
http://www.tofugu.com/2010/09/07/japanese-words-that-make-it-into-english-dictionaries/

• This reply was modified 12 years, 12 months ago by  arleas.