Not completely sure I can tell you how to make it easier – basically, you’ll just get a feel for it eventually. One possible option may be to look at actual Japanese recipes. http://cookpad.com/ is a good site, but sadly there’s no easy way to find the English equivalent – the English version of the website used to link directly back to the original Japanese recipes, but when they threw open their doors to any international slob who wanted to upload a recipe (in the process burying all the Japanese recipes I liked the site for under endless generic American recipes) they also removed the link to the untranslated version.

As it so happens, though, I just bought a dual-language Japanese/English cookbook a few weeks ago. =)

So, “rice” has different words depending on what state it’s in. Rice plant = 稲 (いね）, raw rice = 米 (こめ), cooked rice = ごはん, cooked rice served with Western dishes = ライス (らいす).

To heat = 熱する (ねっする)

To mix = 混ぜる (まぜる)

To cut = 切る (きる)

Sauce = ソース （そーす) – side note, soy sauce = しょうゆ

Potato = じゃがいも – this one’s a tiny bit complex, because they’ve got a lot of potato varieties over there (if it ends with いも, it’s a type of potato), but じゃがいも is what we think of when we hear the word “potato”. It’s also written as ポテト (ぽてと), though I think that’s largely only in the context of potato chips or fried potatoes.

Bread = パン (ぱん) – comes from Portuguese

To add (to the pot) = 入れる (いれる), to add (to other ingredients) = 加える (くわえる)

So envy.

When I was in Japan in 2010, they’d literally just closed Himeji Castle for refubishing, so they’d already covered the main keep in scaffolding, but hadn’t yet opened the observation deck so people could watch them at work. Gonna show off some photos? =)

Hiragana should be a breeze. The kana are pretty much the easiest bits of Japanese. =P

Welcome!

I just answered this question for you last week.

http://www.textfugu.com/bb/topic/reading-japanese/

Ouch. Food poisoning is not fun, in any country. My friend got sick when we tried to climb Mount Fuji – he says he doesn’t get altitude sickness, so the other possible candidate is that it was something he ate…

Anyway, only a thousand photos? You’re not even trying. I’ve only been the once, and I took four and a half thousand. =P

Are they available for viewing anywhere? =)

1. 一緒に話しましょう would probably be better. Side note, で is not the right particle to use there – should be either に or と, which have slightly different meanings. に implies one-way interation (“talk to you”) while と implies reciprocal (“talk with you”). Are these fill-in-the-blank questions? Because if so, the thing that needs to go before the で is a location – for example, 私たちは図書館で話しましょう = let’s talk in the library.

2.0. Think I’d go with わかりました rather than 理解できました. Otherwise it looks ok.

2.1. “I’m often mistaken about (your?) conjugation of temporal verbs, but I’d like to speak with you.” … Those two clauses don’t really seem to go together. And the use of “you” there is downright odd. Again, で in the second clause needs a location. Or a means – you could say 日本語で話したい = I want to talk in Japanese.

3. Not quite sure what you’re getting at with あなたので – “because it’s you”? The second half reads “I wrote using only small words” (though there’s an extraneous た lurking in there).

4. Technically yes, but it’s more normally just said as よい週末を – the verb is implied.

Side note, the use of the second-person pronoun is not nearly as common in Japanese as it is in English. Or… French?

Honestly, the biggest hinderance is going to be kanji. The Japanese government has defined a set of a bit over 2000 kanji as a set called the Joyo Kanji, which is the list of kanji which may be used in official documents and newspapers and the like. Fortunately, like many things, the Joyo Kanji obey the old 80-20 rule – the 20% most-used kanji make up about 80% of what you’re going to encounter in the wild, which means that with 400 kanji under your belt, you’ll probably be able to read most things. Once you learn 1000 kanji, that percentage goes up to 95% or even 99%.

Fortunately, TextFugu includes 412 kanji in its lessons. However, Koichi doesn’t teach the kanji by order of frequency, so you may find yourself lacking in some areas. So by the time you finish the lessons here, you might be able to read a newspaper, though you’ll almost certainly have to look up technical terms.

Not trying to get you down, just letting you know what you’re in for.

Also, vocab may be an issue. You may find yourself requring the aid of a dictionary.

It’s possible to do, though. I bought 二ノ国 for the DS a while back, and I was surprised by how easily I could read everything. Mind you, all the kanji has furigana, so that helps.

After all that, your best bet is probably just to give it a stab and see what happens. A good place to start might be http://www.asagaku.com/ – it’s a version of the Asahi Shimbun daily newspaper designed for school students.

It’s がくせい　じゃない　はず　だ – essentially because you’ve inserted the copula between the noun and the はず.