Learning to Read Japanese (Again)!
Dec 4th, 2007 by William Jones
If you want to learn how to read and write Japanese, here are some free Japanese fonts that will be valuable in your language journey. The website Japan Reference (www.jref.com) has a great selection of Japanese fonts for both the PC and Mac. It is best to start off learning Hiragana and then Katakana. I have a PC, so I downloaded the PJ Hiragana and PJ Katakana.
For a complete list of fonts that Japan Reference has, visit http://www.jref.com/language/fonts.shtml
Learning Japanese is not as hard as everyone thinks it is. I spent a year total in Japan in 1986 when I was in the Marine Corps. In less than three months, I learned to read and write Hiragana and Katakana (two of the three writing systems in Japan) on my own. Each Kana consists of about 45 basic sounds and 77 derivative sounds. Today, in 2007, I probably remember about 10 Hiragana and a few Katakana.
Why am I downloading the Japanese fonts, you ask? Well, I plan to go through James W. Heisig’s book, Remembering The Kana, where he outlines a system of remembering the Kana (both Hiragana and Katakana) in 6 hours. I plan to video my progress and do in 6 hours what originally took me a few months to learn. It should be fun.