Learning to read

I was very encouraged in church this morning, partly just from the service and worship, and partly because it was exciting to be able to start to read! I've been working on memorizing the first of the three systems needed to read and write Japanese, called hiragana. It's something like an alphabet, but it's generally called a syllabary because each symbol represents a syllable rather than what English speakers would think of as a single sound. Next I will learn katakana, which is similar to hiragana and is used to write words of foreign origin. Finally (and most difficult!) I will start memorizing kanji, which are the Chinese pictographs/ideographs used to represent many vocabulary words. (If you're interested in knowing more about it, just do a search on Google, or go to Wikipedia.com) You need to know about 2,000 kanji to read a newspaper, so that's a much bigger task. Anyway, as we sing praise songs, I look at the power point projection of the lyrics, and try to read as much as I can. This morning was the first time that I was able to follow fairly consistently through quite a few of the songs. I got lost many times, but was usually able to find my place again. I only knew the meaning of a few of the words in each song, but it was still very fun to be able to read the sounds as we were singing!