Five things about learning a language (make a post)

•  Was "Five things make a post" used just in my LJ circles and connected circles, or was it a meme? In general, "Five Things" was widely in use. I saw it most in fanfiction, in the context of "Five times that [character verbed] and one time [character] didn't." OTW still uses it in their Five Things [contributor] Said articles. But FTMAP seems like it might be a specific as "this nom reminds me of another nom."
• Duolingo has been a good way to get me dabbling in language expansion. I've complete their Spanish course, which helped me brush up my Spanish enough that I used it to have a conversation with someone about her drink order. I did Esperanto until I started to plateau, and now I'm doing Japanese. It seems to be a good jumping off point, anyway. What I find different from Spanish and Esperanto, which use a familiar alphabet, is that I want to learn to write, but the course gives focus to reading, primarily, and speaking, secondarily. Granted, I just started. But I feel that, if I can incorporate learning to write, I will learn faster.
• On that note, I have been looking at phonetic alphabet (hiragana) and borrowed-word alphabet (katakana) charts, and it is so weird to me how they approach the "a as in apple" mnemonic method by mixing the Japanese letter sound with English words. For example, a chart will show the hiragana with the "o" sound as "o as in orange" instead of "o as in ohayo (good morning)". 
• In that example, orange is even one of the words that has been borrowed into the language, which means that the katakana chart could totally have "o as in oranji". Which is why I've been thinking of making my own katakana chart set up that way. I think it will be easier for me to remember how to write the "pi" and "za" (and therefore, "hi" and "sa," because they are the same base shape) because pizza is a borrowed word written with the two katakana for that sound combo. 
• I also like the idea of using (Western) proper names. I just watched an anime with a character named Ctholly, whose name was spelled on screen phonetically. Which in turn made me consider how Cthulu would be written. Tell me that's not a memory aid. I saw a chart kind of like this, using Pokemon. I was excited for about three seconds, then I realized 1) I only know the pokemon in the app game and 2) I am pretty sure that a lot of them have different names in English that their original names.