learning to read Japanese

The electricity standard here is 100V and American appliances just plug in & work!
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Well i've decided to learn to read Japanese a little bit. There's 4 systems of writing here. The first one is Kanji, which is similar to Chinese - has no phonetic information, so you can't guess how a word is pronouced, all you gotta do is memorize both the pronounciation & meaning. Then there's Hiragana, which is a syllabic system to break down Japanese words phonetically. There's about 40 symbols to memorize, but even if you can pronouce it, you still won't know
what it means. Then there is romaji - the Latin alphabet transctiption for words, but apparently they don't use it that much around here, so it's not much help.
Finally there's Katakana, which is yet another syllabic system, but this time for foreign loan words. I guess this was invented so that foreign words could be introduced into japanese, while still looking like japanese in writing.


The syllabi in this system are like "ka", "mi", "su", "ro", "to" with a lot of sounds like Z and L pretty much absent. So foreign words are also forced to SOUND like Japanese.

There's a table of 5 vowels by 8 consonants (give or take a few minor quirks), which gives me about 40 symbols to memorize. Similar characters don't sound similar, for example the symbols for "su" and "ma" look a lot alike. But what the hell, I got 3 weeks, and this could really help. So here's some foreign loan words you would be able to read in Katakana:

Credit card - kurejito cado
bed - beddo
single room - shinguru rumu
double room - daburu rumu
elevator - erebeta
hotel - hoteru
bus - basu
ok - oke
restaurant - resutoran
beer - biiru
coffee - cohii
milk - miruku
salad - sarada

So even after being able to pronounce a word written in Katakana, you still need to do a bit of guess work.

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A businessman just went by another businessman on his bike, and instead of waving or saying something, he got off, and bowed. The othe guy bowed back & the first guy resumed biking.
...OK after walking around trying to read Katakana signs everywhere I found out you get gibberish syllables about half the time.

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a girl just walked by with a t-shirt that says
KICK CLASH RUMBLE - ANOTHER MYSELF
...
???
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