The Japanese alphabet

By Abner Huertas

Hi, welcome back. In the following posts I'd like to talk about the first steps, at least the ones I've made, to start learning Japanese, in this post I'll begin with the Japanese alphabet.

One of the first things, is to know the basic differences between the languages. First, and foremost, is the alphabet. Japanese doesn't use our alphabet for writing, just as a reference.

Japanese uses three different writing sets: Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. The first two are phonetic syllabary and the third is an ideogram. Japanese language also uses a Romanji alphabet, those are the same letters that you already know, they use this to make "understandable" their writing for westerns, and to make it easy the use of western technology, specially computers.

A syllabary is different from an alphabet that in a syllabary each symbol represent a syllable, for example: ne is ね. An alphabet each symbol is just one letter. Kanji is an ideogram, this means that each symbol represents a word or an idea.

Hiragana is the starter point, then is Katakana, and then Kanji. Let me give you an example of each one, I'll write: "My name is Abner".

私はアブナーです。  

watashi wa Abner  desk.

The first part is Kanji 私 (watashi), then follows the hiragana particle は (wa); next is my name in katakana アブナー (Abner), and last is the verb です (desu) that it's like "to be". Hiragana has more "curves" while Katakana has more "straight" lines.

At this point I'm still an absolute beginner in Japanese, but I can give you an advice. If you really want to learn Japanese, don't rely just in romanji, that's a bad practice. Learn Hiragana first, then learn Katakana.

At this point I've already learnt hiragana and katakana, I feel like if I'm reading as a kindergarten. To learn this two syllabaries I've used a method that consists of doing  "elementary homework" and by playing games.

In the next post I will teach you a method to learn this two syllabaries. In my case took me three weeks to learn.

またね。