I am learning the Japanese language
In 1998 I started to develop an interest in learning Japanese. The first inspiration I had
along this line was watching original Sailor Moon Videos from Japan. I found out that one of
my friends, Taffy, is literate in Japanese and I gained further interest from discussing it
with her. Then I started watching other Japanese videos and another of my friends, Arcee,
gave me a book on the history of Japan. As I read the book and started to become familiar
with other facets of Japanese culture through reading articles on the net and watching movies
my interest became more serious and I concluded that I wanted to become literate in both the
written and oral forms of the language. Daddy also concluded that it would fit in nicely with
a new direction for his career.
For about the first year starting in late 1998 I picked up a few basic words and phrases
from watching my videos. Then when my interest became more serious, I started to make plans
for how I could study the language. I embarked on a home made study plan at the same time
Daddy started looking into what formal classes might be available. I decided the first
thing to do was to gain a basic capability to write since that would allow me to write
vocabulary words etc. and help me learn the language. I discovered early on that there are
four sets of symbols used to write Japanese. They are Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji, and Romanji.
Hiragana is the set that Japanese children learn first, so that's where I decided to start.
At this point I have memorized 104 Hiragana and I am working on building my vocabulary. This
will be the place where I can hang up my home work and test papers. *smile* Everything I show
here will be my handwritten work scanned to a .GIF image file for these pages. I'm not trying
to teach Japanese since I am certainly not qualified; so I will leave out a lot of details so
this doesn't get boring. Please, if you see that I have made a mistake in something here, let
me know.
Kana:
The Japanese word "kana" refers to the symbols used in the two Japanese syllabaries. The two
syllabraies are Hiragana and Katakana. Each Hiragana or Katakana symbol represents something
that western people call a syllable. In most cases the sound represented is one western
people would represent with more than one letter of the alphabet. For this reason, Hiragana
and Katakana are referred to as a syllabary. Romaji, is the system where combinations of
roman letters are used to represent the same sounds represented by each of the Kana symbols.
I will show you with Romaji how to say the sound of each Hiragana. The second syllabary
called Katakana represents the same set of sounds as the Hiragana symbols. Hiragana is used
for writing Japanese words; Katakana is used for writing words borrowed from other languages.
For instance "cookie" is not a Japanese word so they would write it using Katakana. Since
Japanese does not have all the same sounds used in western languages like English, quite often
English words sound different to us when pronounced in Japanese. When we write our roman
alphabet, we have a specific, defined, order we place the characters in. From what I have read
and been taught so far, there isn't an equivalent ordering for the kana. The names in the
Hiragana links below are just what I call these sets of symbols. So far I haven't seen what,
if any, names the Japanese have for these groups of symbols. I think they are all just called
Hiragana.
Copyright © by Liesel Siobhan
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