Originally Posted by
mashtofu
Weird, this thread was just started in the roadie forum recently too.
Being self-employed gives me lots of free time for hobbies: photography, drawing (graphite/digital), tattoos (especially "hand-poke" Japanese tebori), Photoshop, Japanese language and culture, aikido, sword-fighting, training and playing with my 2 dogs, hiking, indoor horticulture, MMORPG's, recycling and picking up garbage, eating with chopsticks... I want to learn calligraphy too, but I think I'll wait until I begin learning katakana and kanji.
learn katakana, then you can read all the english words that are used in japanese. Usually you can just sound it out (if its a word from english)
edit: obviously kanji is important too, the reason I say this is that learning katakana is a cake walk relative to learning kanji