Well, I finished memorizing all my Hiragana for my Japanese classes. So I set about figuring out how to actually type it. It took me a few hours trying to figure out how to configure my Debian desktop. It was somewhat tricky, given that I'm not literate enough to read the Japanese documentation. I had the most trouble just with the trivial task of getting kmodmap and KDE to cooperate -- so I could remap the Windows key to be the Kanji conversion key. I never got kinput2 to work, but I finally managed to get UIM + anthy + gedit to work! Very cool.
I'm glad I'm using Debian - all the packages were just there. It seems like it will be a handy way to study, since retyping Hiragana involves me converting back to romaji so I can type it.