Anyone here understand the Japanese language?
 

I'm teaching myself to speak the language with the help of the internets, but I wanted to know if this was accurate:

To be honest, you'd probably be better off with a book or something. Most of the internet stuff is pretty unreliable. The table you've got up there, katakana, is used to represent foreign names and words. If you've just started learning Japanese then you need to start with kanji or hiragana, which are the core meanings of words and how to link them together.

Seeing as I only speak about fifteen words in Japanese I have no idea whether the table up there is right. Good luck.

yeah start with kanji then hiragana its easier that way in my opinion but i think theres some books that are really easy to learn from

I agree with learning the kanji first
But i've been teaching myself from the internet too
Good thing I can't remember it all so I can start again
HA

I understand the words, just not the symbols.

i think nat, paperdreams, pretty much said it.
that alphabet is essentially useless for trying to learn the everyday language.

I'm aware of that, I got about 5 books on it.

I think you'd be best learning the romanji (japanese with latin characters) first, then learn hiragana, kanji etc later on. That's what I'm trying to do. Of course if you want to learn both Japanese and Chinese kanji would be very helpful once you learn the romanji, considering kanji is the chinese style of writing (not exactly but I can't remember all the details of it).

theres a book i got.. ugh talk japanese or something.. it was quite good :)

o-kay.
i only said what i said cos you said you wanted to learn to speak the language. &then, wouldn't that alphabet not help you to learn the speak it, at all?

i'm half jap. i understand it fluently but cant read, write or speak it! dont think that helps you but i hope you can find someone that can!

soph.