Alphabet, the basic of the spoken language. It's cool to know how to write it, but in real life, actually pronouncing the sounds is way more important than knowing how to write or read them. As a preparation for our first skype meeting(planned sometime next weekend), I'd like you to listen to this a few times to get the basic idea of the Japanese language soundset. You don't have to worry about scripts yet if you don't want to(tho remembering hiragana takes a week at most if you're at it every day and it's only a matter of time before you have to learn it :).

Japanese soundset