So, I recently downloaded a nifty little app for my iPhone called “Learning Japanese” by Ronald Timoshenko. Thanks to that, I’ve found what is easily the best resource I’ve found for learning Japanese in all the years I’ve wanted to learn it: Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese. I’ve picked up many, many language guides over the last thirteen few years, most of them for Japanese, and all I have to say is “when the heck is Tae Kim going to write guides for the other languages I want to learn?” If I’d had this when I started wanting to learn Japanese, I’d be fluent by now. Every time I pick this up, I learn something new and useful, and things I thought I knew I finally understand. I’m grasping the difference between は and が (okay, I wasn’t too bad on that one) now, between だ and です (blew my mind, that one, but I’m glad to finally have a handle on the rules for だ), に and で (I was really clueless about these, but now I’m glad to understand them a bit better). What I need now is Tae Kim’s Guide to Irish, Tae Kim’s Guide to Swedish, Tae Kim’s Guide to French, Tae Kim’s Guide to German, and Tae Kim’s Guide to Finnish. I really recommend this to anyone interested in learning Japanese. Maybe I’ll finally be able to cross that barrier and become comfortable with a second language. It irks me that for someone as in love with languages as I am that I’m essentially monolingual. But this is my year to achieve goals, and this one seems achievable. Once I’ve got some grounding in this, I’ll have to try finding some conversational partners to practise with (LiveMocha may work well for that, but it’s a bit spammy and I’d rather have someone local that I can chat with face to face). I think I’ll dig out Marc Bernabe’s Japanese in Mangaland again too, but I suspect I’ll be putting my other books up for sale (or, considering the condition of books that lived in my pocket in high school, the freecycle bin). Anyone want a copy of Teach Yourself Japanese?