What's New
While we're glad to offer you a reference for the Japanese alphabets, we've teamed up with a blog to provide the most upto date Japanese lessons.
RisingSunRadio.com is a great blog for updates about the Japanese language and lessons. The posts are short and informative.
The Japanese Writing System
The Big Three
Three different kinds of characters comprise the Japanese writing system:
Hiragana - native words and syntax.
Katakana - foriegn words.
Kanji - adapted chinese characters or pictographs.
The first two Hiragana and Katakana
are phonetic, they tell you how to say the word, whereas Kanji is a symbol or group of symbols which
convey a meaning but do not indicate their pronounciation. All three writing systems may be used in a single sentance.
Mastering these three writing systems is not as hard as it seems. They should be learned in order. Speaking Japanese will follow easily once the phonetics are learned. The roman letter representations follow closely to their English counterparts with the exception of e and i: pronounced a (long) and e (long) respectively.
Hiragana
Katakana
Lesson 1
In this lesson you will learn the very basics of speaking Japanese. You should already be farmiliar with the Hiragana and Katakana writing systems. If not, go back and review them until you are confortable with them. The romanized pronunciation will appear only in the first few lessons.
Useful Links
- http://www.autopenhosting.org/unicode/type-Japanese.html - Entering Special Japanese Characters
- RisingSunRadio.com - A great site to help learn Japanese.
