Hey,everyone! This is my first tutorial of the Japanese language. Here we’ll discuss the very basics of the language. To know any language you must know it’s building blocks,the pieces that form up the language! Of course,that’s the characters! In the Japanese language,there are 3 different writing styles(or character set if you prefer) which are used differently. The styles are: A-Katakana B-Hiragana C-Kanji.
I’ll go into detail for each of them in a bit,so hold your horses .
Katakana is the writing style that is used for words of foreign origin. Words that are not originally Japanese (e.g. Ski,Computer,Tennis,Sweater and country names to name a few…)
I’d suggest you start learning these characters first,so you can read katakana words and get a feeling of the Japanese language .

2-Hiragana: Characters used as grammar parts,i.e.particles. These characters have slightly different shape than the previous ones,but they’re fairly close. I’d suggest you take these second after learning Hiragana.

3-Kanji: Characters of Chinese origin which were imported into the Japanese language. These characters have witnessed quite a change in shape over the years. These characters,however, can’t be read like Katakana and Hiragana. But rather have a distinct readings and important-to-memorize stroke order. I will not go deep into Kanji since each character needs to be memorized seperately. I’ll,however,post some initial and primitive ones.

Here’s a site that I found to be more useful than I could ever be :)…here enjoy!

http://members.aol.com/writejapan/index.htm

After you all have memorized these characters(not necessarily Kanji at this point) advance to my next lesson next week

Cya then

Tags: japanese, japanese language, learning japanese language