Hello,

I've gone through RTK1 and I've just learnt the kana. I can do kana syllable translation fairly well, but I'm struggling with english syllable to kana. How important do you think this is? Should I just continue improving my reading/recognition, hoping that in time the other way will come naturally?

Thanks

Don't bother with it. Any loanwords you learn will be learned in katakana anyhow, so there's no need to learn to translate English sounds to kana.

Eventually, you'll get pretty good at it without trying, too.

Thank god for that . My Anki deck has kana->english and english->kana, so I'll try and disable/delete those cards.

Is your problem Romaji to kana or English to kana?

There is a very important difference between them. It's absolutely critical to be able to go from SE to せ. Or KA to か.

It's not so important at the moment to go from David to デッヴィド if that's what your problem is.

Hi kitakitsune, I've decided to plow on with grammar and vocab through Tae Kim. I'm finding that I'm doing english->kana translations in there anyway and I'm learning them slowly. I think it's just practise in this way. I can read kana pretty well now.