This is a book where I talk about languages and studying and stuff, more like a blog than anything else.
There'll be rants, tips, theories, stuff I find funny, and just random things that cross my mind :P
Japanese is a really interesting language and entering it I knew I would learn a lot, but I also learned how to do something completely un language related:
It taught me how to draw better.
In the beginning I notice that I often times pressed my pencil down way too hard on the paper and incorrectly drew the proportions of the kanji. I also generally really disliked drawing kanji because it was difficult and looked bad.
But by looking a little bit into the stroke order, it made me realize that there are ways to make kanji look good and to do it fast.
I'm not like a kanji scholar or anything, but I studied a little bit of how to draw some kanji and it went a long way.
Like I was going from this
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To this
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Which still isn't perfect, but it's become more natural.
So what does this have to do with drawing? It made me think differently about the actual line strokes I was doing, allowed me to make them in a way that made the drawing look more natural and smooth.
So if you're learning Japanese, don't be like me and wait three years to learn how to write the language correctly.
Even just studying the stroke order of a few kanji will help you so much and enable you to copy that behavior in other kanji and make it so much faster to write and so much more natural.
By the way if you have an iPhone I recommend this Japanese dictionary (it's also where I learned stroke order):
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It shows you the kanji, all the readings for it, conjugations if it's a verb, and example sentences. It also lets you draw in kanji so if you can't identify a kanji you see you can just write it and it'll search it for you.
And a bunch of other stuff for learning and studying kanji but I never use them lmao
