It’s time to begin our Japanese learning plan Step 1: Learn the alphabet and correct pronuncia

It’s time to begin our Japanese learning plan

Step 1: Learn the alphabet and correct pronunciation

• To do: (1) learn 10 kana a day (reading, writing, pronunciation, usage), (2) listen to native Japanese speakers and shadow their sounds for better pronunciation. Listen to the news, real life stuff not anime. Unless you want to sound cartoony. After you get the correct sound down then feel free to go watch your favorite anime.
• Time limit: 2 weeks- 1 month

“The Alphabet" 

The Japanese language has 3 writing systems:

• Kana are the syllabic Japanese scripts. There are two kana scripts: hiraganaandkatakana.  Japanese children start to read and write in hiragana before making an attempt to learn some of the two thousand kanji commonly used.   

• Hiragana are sometimes used to write words which would normally written with katakana to make them appear more “feminine”, particularly in comic books and cartoons for young girls. In children’s video games texts are often written entirely in hiragana or katakana.

• Kanji are ideograms, i.e. each character has its own meaning and corresponds to a word.

Japanese is sometimes written in Romaji. Romaji is primarily used for the convenience of foreigners. With Romaji, one can read Japanese without knowing any Japanese writing system. Although there are several systems of Romaji, the most widely used is a modified Hepburn system.

How many kana are there? 

46 (basic set-green), 36 (combined-blue), 25 (dakuten-orange)= 107 each

So to learn 214 kana  doing 10 a day=21.4 days (22 days)

Or if you just focus on the basic set you would be done in about 10 days. Look at the chart and you will see the combined and dakuten are just variations of the basic set.

However you want to learn it is on you. But I want to complete this in 2 weeks. Feel free to use mnemonics and flashcards (widely used program is ANKI)

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Check point:

• Can you identifyall the hiragana and katakana 
• Can you writethem all?
• Can you pronouncethem all?
• Can you translate kana to romaji and vice versa? (side note: once you understand kana don’t use romaji – use your kana- Tell you why later…)
• Can you read a passage in kana or with kanji but with furigana on top. Furigana is the small kana above a kanji to help read.

If you cleared this level move to the next one…Meet the Kanji! Don’t cry. 

-Nisha