I'm learning little by little with this thread. Watching anime all day everyday may have my comprehension of Japanese a bit skewed.

You also have to take into account that subtitles wont do exact translations most of the time.  Cultural differences being a major player in a translation veering pretty far off from its literal translation.

And puns often can't be translated, so whenever someone reacts to one the translators have basically to create a new one to fit in

This takes me back to the Nintendo Switch reveal presentation, where they revealed Travis Strikes Again and the interpreter couldn't deal with Suda at all. I was watching the Japanese presentation, went back and watched the English one later after seeing him get bashed online and felt so bad for him. As someone who works in Japanese-English interpreting/translating, Suda was literally just dropping Japanese pro-wrestling jokes that you need a bunch of specific knowledge for, there's no way you can just interpret that on the spot, the dude did the best he could do. People don't realise how hard it is to achieve the general goal of interpreting - getting the same response out of your audience as the original did.

I'm just starting to learn now. I've taken two classes.

Instead of learning Japanese, you should learn ebonics.

Yeah. My teacher likes to move at the speed of light. After the first class, she wanted us to know the entire Hiragana and Katakana by heart. I was able to do it by putting in a lot of hours of study. The best way to memorize them is through little online games. I used guessing games, memory, Q&As.. All that I could.

Last class we were taught to count to 10 million, and Kanji up to ten. I'm trying to aborb that now. it's a tough class IMO.

Oddly enough, it wasn't easy for me to understand those words all written in kana, I'm getting more and more used to kanjis so read for eg. にほんご instead of 日本語 confuses me.

And yeah, a huge amount of words written in katatanas are based on words we can find in english, like テレビ which means television (shortened).

I always learned 4 as "shi" and 7 as "shichi"

Anyway, you use "juu" to use 10s, I believe, so 21 is "ni juu ichi". 

Late gratz!!!!

Just remembered i learned counting from karatelessons as a kid,funny i always connected them with Karate and not Japanese haha.