I’ve opened up a submissions box to allow others to contribute. Feel free to send in other info that I’ve missed, corrections, funny lolcat pictures, and other things that I might ask for people to submit there. I’ve never really used a submissions box before, so I’m not entirely sure how it works.
Yep! For those of you reading at home, it is typically used for foreign proper nouns such as ‘Sydney’ and your own name (a motivation for you to learn katakana, no?)
Thank you for bringing this up! :D
Thank you! The language has its pros and cons. The writing system is difficult, but the grammar does seem to be easier than English. :)
I’ve had a couple of really good comments on my ‘JAPANESE HAS *THREE* ALPHABETS? WHAAAAAAT?’ post that some of you might find useful. It won’t let me reblog them, so I’ll just post them here.
Kotobanoumi explains Furigana, and shiruba-mizuumi adds some further information about Katakana. I was going to clear this up in my Katakana post, but thank you for making it easier for me! :D
Ooh, awesome! Thank you for following me! :D 頑張りましょう！
In this post, I will address the way that Japanese is written. People who are new to the language often hear that Japanese has three ‘alphabets’ (as they call them), and thus decide that that is way too much, and the language is much too complicated.
Japanese doesn’t exactly have three ‘alphabets’. I guess you could think of them as three different ‘scripts’.
“BUT TAYLAH, THAT’S SO MUCH!”
You shouldn’t be concerned with the amount of ‘alphabets’, but rather the amount of characters in one particular ‘alphabet’. Two of the three are relatively easy to learn. You could learn them in a week (per script). Don’t feel pressured if you don’t think you can learn it that quickly, it took me significantly longer to learn them. This brings me to the next section, where I describe each one.
HIRAGANA
Hiragana is a syllabary made up of 48 characters. Each character represents a particular sound (rather than letter like in English). They are mostly made up of a consonant + vowel sound combination, but there are exceptions. Hiragana is used to write native Japanese words for which there are no Kanji (I’ll explain what that is later) and suffixes, for word endings and sometimes in place of the Kanji. This is the first script you should learn. Doing so will enable you to write any sentence in Japanese. It will also enable you to read childrens’ books, which are mostly written in Hiragana.
KATAKANA
Katakana is a syllabary which is also made up of 48 characters. The characters are different than to hiragana, but represent the same sounds. How convenient! Katakana is mostly used for words ‘borrowed’ from other languages, but can also be used at times for emphasis (almost like ALL CAPS in a way). This should be the one you learn next. A large percentage (I believe around 85%) of words that are written in katakana are borrowed from English, so chances are you’ll be able to guess loads of words just by reading them in Katakana.
KANJI
Kanji are characters borrowed and adapted from Chinese. There are thousands of them (GASP!), but luckily for you, you only need to know about 1945 in order to be considered literate/fluent. Each character typically has its own meaning (or several), and often has several readings depending on the context and placing with other Kanji. If you’re from a Chinese speaking background, you probably already know a lot more Kanji than I ever will. However, you need to be careful. While many Kanji share the same meaning with Chinese characters, some have vastly different meanings. For example, 手紙 (tegami) in Japanese means ‘letter’, but in Chinese it means ‘toilet paper’.
That sums up the three ‘alphabets’ in Japanese. I hope that the fact that there are three of them doesn’t make you want to flail your arms and cry.
HOW IS HIRAGANA, KATAKANA AND KANJI USED?
They are usually mixed in together. It isn’t unusual to find all three in the same sentence. An example of this:
ケーキを食べました。 (keeki wo tabemashita) - I ate cake.
Don’t worry if you can’t read this yet, or if you can’t tell what character is Hiragana, Katakana or Kanji, it won’t take you long to learn the difference.
That brings me to the end of this post. Stay tuned, next we get to learn some Hiragana. w00t!
If you’re reading this, chances are you are at least somewhat interested in learning Japanese… or I managed to pay you enough money to visit my blog.
If you want to study Japanese, or learn what that “Dattebayo” thing is you randomly yell out all the time because you kind of like Naruto a bit (or maybe a lot) actually means, this probably isn’t the blog for you. There’s plenty of resources that are more knowledgeable on this subject, but since I’ve had a few people asking me questions about Japanese, and to help improve my own Japanese, I’m making a blog anyway.
So here it is.
