Welcome to my blog!
This is the second of five (maybe more) posts I’ll be doing about Japan!
If you haven’t seen my intro post for this, I recommend looking at that.
Today I’ll be talking about the basics of the Japanese writing system!
First thing I think you should know is the fact that there are 3 alphabets:
- Hiragana
- Katakana
- Kanji
First up is hiragana.
This alphabet is used for native Japanese words.
This one has 46 characters, which each represent a certain sound. Here are what a few of the characters look like:
あ – A
い – I
う- U
え – E
お – O
These are the vowel sounds. Most of the remaining characters are one of these vowel sounds, and a consonant. Here’s a hiragana chart:
In this chart, you can see the romaji (the english writing to show the pronunciation the character makes) beside each hiragana.
Here are some examples of words in hiragana (I’ve also added romaji):
Delicious – おいしい (romaji: oishii)
Umbrella – かさ (romaji: kasa)
Shoes – くつ (romaji: kutsu)
If you wanted to write ‘hiragana’ it would look like this:
ひらがな
If you’re interested in learning hiragana, I would recommend watching the video I’ve put below because I thought it was really helpful when I was learning hiragana.
Next up is katakana.
This one is used for loanwords (words from other languages) and foreign names.
For example:
My name (Hannah): ハンナ (romaji: Hanna)
This one has all the same sounds of hiragana, but 46 more characters you have learn.
Here are the first five characters, and their hiragana equivalent beside it, and the romaji:
ア – あ- A
イ – い- I
ウ – う- U
エ – え- E
オ – お- O
Here is a katakana chart:
If you look closely you can see that some of the characters are the same, or look sort of like their hiragana counterpart; hiragana is more rounded, while katakana is more angular.
If you wanted to write ‘katakana’ it would look like this:
カタカナ
If you’re interested in learning katakana, I recommend watching the video below, but I would learn hiragana first, then go onto katakana.
And last but not least, kanji!
I haven’t learned to write any kanji yet, though I can recognize some (I just learned a few learning the days of the week), but I’ll tell you what I know.
There are way more characters than hiragana and katakana in our third and final alphabet. There is over 50,000 kanji. That’s a lot. Of course, no one is required to learn all of these and I highly doubt that anyone knows every single one, but there is a list of kanji that Japanese students learn throughout grades 1-12 . It is called jouyou kanji, and it has 2,136 kanji on it.
Also, some kanji can also be pronounced different ways, and have multiple meanings.
I think that’s all I’m going to write for todays post. I tried my best to teach you the basics, though I haven’t said anything about combined characters, dakuten, or handakuten, but I might do another post explaining that.
I hope you enjoyed reading this, and you aren’t hopelessly lost, and maybe you understand a bit more about the Japanese writing system! And maybe you also want to start learning Japanese? If you have any questions, feel free to put it in the comments, or if you know me in real life, just come up to me and ask! (I cannot guarantee that I can answer your question, but I’ll try) ( ◠‿◠ )
Note- I know that learning more than one alphabet might seem hard, but once you get started, its pretty easy and fun to learn
Another note: If you are serious about learning Japanese, I recommend a textbook called Genki (third edition) I find it really helpful and easy to understand
Yet another note: Google translate is not the best at Japanese, just a warning