Ohaiyogozaimasu, Konichiwa, and Konbanwa onigaishimasu!
Greetings reader! Welcome to the 1st blog post on my journey to learn how to speak and use Japanese or “Nihongo” as it would be called in Japanese.
I’ve always wanted to learn another language other than English. I’ve taken high school Spanish which is very practical and useful in SoCal in addition to being a beautiful language. I took one course in French in college and that was great also! But eventually I decided to pursue Japanese.
I’ve started to actively learn summer of 2016 and I began with a google search on how to start learning. Turns out a good place to start is by learning the writing system. Japanese has 3 character sets: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji.
Hiragana Characters: あいうえお A I U E O
Katakana Characters: アイウエオ A I U E O
Kanji Characters: 白黒熊 Shiro kuro kumo (White black bear)
Hiragana and Katakana are both syllabaries and their characters represent, you guessed it, the syllables of words in Japanese! I like to think of Hiragana and Katakana as fraternal twin siblings. They both have the same amount of characters and represent the same sounds but looks slightly different. Why would there be two sets of characters if they will represent the same sounds anyways?! Well the main reason is that hiragana is used to write native words like shoyu or kasa which is Japanese for “soy sauce” and “umbrella”. Katakana is used to write foreign words like computer written “konpyuttaa”.
Kanji is used to represent whole words or multiple syllables. This helps keep messages compact but requires people to have to memorize standard sets of Kanji. As a student in Japan one is required to learn about 1000 kanji characters by 6th grade! I’ve got a lot of catching up to do! >_<
I look forward to sharing my journey though the Japanese language and hopefully helping others trying to learn as well!
Thank you very much! (for reading)
どもありがとうございます！
Domo arigatogozaimasu!
