For those of you who are completely new to the Japanese language, this post might be interesting to you.\u00a0 The Japanese language consists of three different writing systems.\u00a0 Learning all three writing systems is one of the challenges that Japanese learners face.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Let’s start with the most common writing system, the hiragana (\u3072\u3089\u304c\u306a<\/strong>).\u00a0 Hiragana (\u3072\u3089\u304c\u306a<\/strong>) letters are used to express native Japanese words.\u00a0 The hiragana (\u3072\u3089\u304c\u306a<\/strong>) consist of letters that represent different syllables.\u00a0 For example, this letter \u3042 <\/strong>is used to represent the sound ‘a’ as in the ‘a’ in the English word ‘aunt.’\u00a0<\/p>\n The second writing system is the katakana (\u304b\u305f\u304b\u306a<\/strong>).\u00a0 The katakana (\u304b\u305f\u304b\u306a<\/strong>) is used to express foreign words and is also syllable based.\u00a0 For example, \u30a2<\/strong> is used to express the sound ‘a’ as in ‘aunt.’\u00a0 Interestingly enough, the word for ‘China’ in Japanese is expressed in hiragana (\u3072\u3089\u304c\u306a<\/strong>) while the word for ‘America’ is expressed in katakana (\u304b\u305f\u304b\u306a<\/strong>).\u00a0 Although both words are the name of countries, the word for China has been active in the Japanese language since olden days.\u00a0 Japan’s contact with the U.S. is relatively recent, especially when you compare it with Japan’s contact with China.\u00a0 As a result, the word for America is considered a loan word in Japanese.<\/p>\n Also, you might see this symbol\u00a0\u30fc<\/strong> when you’re reading katakana (\u304b\u305f\u304b\u306a<\/strong>) letters.\u00a0 That dash is not part of the katakana (\u304b\u305f\u304b\u306a<\/strong>) alphabet.\u00a0 That dash is more like a notation to indicate that the vowel is prolonged.\u00a0 For example, the word for cake in Japanese is keeki (\u30b1\u30fc\u30ad<\/strong>).\u00a0 Notice the dash after the character ke (\u30b1<\/strong>)\u00a0.\u00a0 Whenever you see the dash after a character, the character before the dash is the vowel that is elongated.\u00a0 So instead of pronouncing this word as keki (\u30b1\u30ad<\/strong>) it is pronounced as keeki (\u30b1\u30fc\u30ad<\/strong>).\u00a0 In this case the ‘e’ vowel is prolonged.<\/p>\n Both the hiragana (\u3072\u3089\u304c\u306a<\/strong>) and the katakana (\u304b\u305f\u304b\u306a<\/strong>) have characters with diacritical marks.\u00a0 For example the character ka (\u304b<\/strong>) becomes a ga (\u304c<\/strong>) with the symbol that looks like a quotation mark \u201d.\u00a0 Similarly, when the character ha (\u306f<\/strong>) has a diacritical mark that looks like a small circle, it will turn into pa (\u3071<\/strong>).\u00a0 The diacritical marks indicate that unvoiced consonants such as k and h will turn into g and p respectively.<\/p>\n Lastly, let’s get to the third writing system, the kanji (\u304b\u3093\u3058<\/strong>).\u00a0 The kanji (\u304b\u3093\u3058<\/strong>) is used to express nouns and adjectives.\u00a0 It’s primarily used to express the meaning of words rather than express the sounds of words.\u00a0 For example, with a pictorial symbol such as this: \u65e5<\/strong> the reader would understand that the Japanese word for\u00a0‘day’ is being expressed without having to write the actual sounds for the word ‘day’ in Japanese.\u00a0 Kinda cool huh?\u00a0 The kanji (\u304b\u3093\u3058<\/strong>) is useful when you have to\u00a0read and decipher a long sentence in Japanese.\u00a0 Sometimes there is no space between words and the kanji (\u304b\u3093\u3058<\/strong>) can help to clarify and break up the sentence into understandable chunks.<\/p>\n The Japanese writing system is learnable.\u00a0 Even though it may seem complicated at first, practicing will give you an intuitive feel for the language and help you to gain fluency.\u00a0 So practice, practice,\u00a0practice\u00a0everyone!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For those of you who are completely new to the Japanese language, this post might be interesting to you.\u00a0 The Japanese language consists of three different writing systems.\u00a0 Learning all three writing systems is one of the challenges that Japanese learners face.\u00a0 Let’s start with the most common writing system, the hiragana (\u3072\u3089\u304c\u306a).\u00a0 Hiragana (\u3072\u3089\u304c\u306a)…<\/p>\n