DISCLAIMER I don't know what I'm doing

To steal from one of my favorite podcasts: "WARNING: the following web log may contain material that is inappropriate for viewers that are under the age of 18, are easily offended, or get annoyed by holier-than-thou know-it-alls that are... anything but." 

Side note - Anime World Order podcast, that has been going since 2005 and so has been around almost as long as I've had this blogspot account (heh. back when it was blogspot), and therefore nearly predates the phrase "podcast", is a great way to listen to people who are absolutely obsessed and enamored with anime rattle off Japanese names (people and shows) with wild abandoned and talk (from an older, US fandom based perspective) on the history, culture, and intricacies of the genere. The episodes are almost always 2 hours +  and I cannot fully express the depth of knowledge and passion that they exude -- and I like it even IF it is from know-it-alls who are... anything but. 

Back to me...(/◕ヮ◕)/

I am going to make a post about learning kana - that is, katakana and hiragana, two of the written Japanese languages. 

I do not actually know kana. 

I want to make that very clear. I have never taken a class, I have not signed up for any online tutoring, I haven't even read the Manga Guide to Learning Japanese. 

I'm still going to write about it. In part, yes, I acknowledge I am a lousy gaijin ( 外人 ) and there is a lot of historical baggage that comes from me being a privileged, white, US citizen that affects my belief in myself.

But... in the same breath... I am having SO MUCH GODDAMN FUN learning kana I HAVE to share it! I have ALWAYS been bad at memorization, but I held out that maybe some day, I could attempt to "learn Japanese" and it would be like a game or like learning the list of Pokemons, and it WOULDN'T be hard, or at least if it was it would be fun AND IT IS AND I AM VERY JAZZED WHEN I LOOK AT A WORD LIKE ファンシー and realize that I can sound it out (hu-ah-n-shi --- fhuan-shi --faancy-- OMG IT SAYS FANCY!)!!!

I just think that if there are other people out there who are hesitant but passionate about at least trying to learn something as overwhelming as a foreign language that has a totally different sentence structure than English and three main alphabets, I want to say GO FOR IT because I did and I want to explain what worked for me.