LESSON 1
Reading and Writing Japanese
Written Japanese is actually a combination of three
different scripts. The first, kanji, consists of ideographic characters. The
other two, hiragana and katakana, are syllabic scripts - each character
represents a syllable.
Kanji
Kanji are ideographic (symbol that each represent a concept,
idea or thing as well as pronunciation, rather than a word or set of words)
borrowed from Chinese, example 本 (hon) for (book), 娘 (mu-su-me) for (daughter) and 日本語 (ni-hon-go) for (Japanese
language). Each kanji may be made up of anything from one to over 20 strokes
written in particular order. Some kanji characters have two or more ways of
being pronounced depending on the context. For example, the kanji 水 is pronounced mi-zu when it means (water), but su-i when it's
part of another word like 水筒 (pronounced su-i-tō) for (water bottle).
There are over 2000 kanji in use in modern Japanese, of
which 1945 are considered essential for everyday use. Of these, the Ministry of
Education has designated 1006 characters as basic - these are taught at primary
school level.
Hiragana
Hiragana is used to represent particle and grammatical
endings particular to Japanese and are placed alongside the ideographic
characters - one single Japanese word can contain both scripts. There are 46
basic hiragana characters, each representing a particular syllable. They can be
combined to represent over 100 different syllables.
Where's the market? 市場はどこですか?
(i-chi-ba wa do-ko des ka)
Note that in the phrase above the word for (market)
(i-chi-ba) is written in kanji (市場),
but the rest - the particle wa (は),
the question word do-ko (どこ),
the verb des (です) and
the interrogative particle ka (か)
- in hiragana.
Katakana
Each hiragana character also has katakana equivalent.
Katakana are used to represent recent borrowings from other languages,
especially English. They're also used to write foreign names - you might want
to figure out how to write your own name in Japanese.
Credit card クレジットカード
(ku-re-jit-to-kā-do)
My name is Anthony. 私の名前はアンソニーです。(wa-ta-shi
no na-me-e wa an-so-ī des)
I'm from Australia. オーストラリアから来ました。 (ō-sto-ra-rya ka-ra ki-mash-ta)
Note that Japanese words for (credit card), (Anthony) and
(Australia) are all written in katakana.Read Hiragana Left [Red] & Katakana Right [Blue]
Some Japanese Words Kanji
(Complete)