Firstly, welcome to the forum! Youkoso.
Domo!
Secondly, well.. usually (at least the later ones) each show has a pdf document which displays the romaji and pronunciation of the word or phrase used in the show. However, without knowing which words you are referring to, I'll take a guess and say that "a little" is "chotto" (cho-toh), and tired is "tsukaretta" (tsu-ka-reh-ta). Does that help?
It helps a whole lot, I thought I was pronouncing tsukaretta correctly, but I was wrong. I wasn't far off though, but you help clear it up for me and I definitely appreciate it. I will use my normal podcast aggregator to download the shows and see if I get the PDFs, I just downloaded the first few directly from the rss feed and got just the audio files. So far it sounds like a great fun podcast. The second episode seems hard though
I think learning Japanese in whatever way that gives you motivation is a good thing. If watching anime and reading subtitles encourages you to learn the language, then that is better than sitting with your head buried in a 400 page book, yawning at every second line.
I hesitated to say that as I didn't want anyone to get the impression that the only reason I want to learn Japanese is to watch Anime. Its just my shortest term goal with it, I would love to be able to carry on a conversation with my wife in Japanese. Especially when we go to the restaurant with my family, we can talk trash about them without them knowing!
I would love to some day be able to go to Japan on vacation (doubt it will happen though, its very expensive!) and to be able to speak the language while there would be great.
The added bonus is, if you're into samurai anime, when you come to Japan, you can freely walk around the country and challenge everyone to a duel, on the rooftop of some place at full moon. I challenged the convenience store clerk yesterday, but he declined.. but you get that.......
I laughed a lot at this when I read it this morning, thanks for starting my day on a laugh! haha
It's a good point you raise about learning to crawl before you walk. It's a fine line between throwing yourself in the deep end, and not being discouraged because the mountain ahead of you is a 90 degree slope. Take small steps, and.. umm, errr.. yeah, some other words of wisdom here. You know what I mean.
I am trying to suppress my natural urge to over do everything immediately and burn myself out on it. I really am motivated and just hope I can stick with it. Sometimes just trying to memorize some of the words seems a daunting task, but I found just listening to the language, even if I don't understand what is being said is sort of attuning my ears to the language and making it easier to memorize stuff. Does that even make sense?
