Nowadays, katakana is used for loanwords from foreign languages (often English), names of companies and sometimes the names of plants and animals.
Katakana was invented with more or less the same reason as hiragana, to write words more easily. They were developed by monks around the 9th century and scholars speculate it was originally developed in Korea. Katakana seems as the somewhat more cool styled version of hiragana and in daily life it’s also used more to be stylish. The characters can be clearly distinguished from the hiragana and kanji characters because the katakana characters are much more straight and have fewer lines. Learn all Hiragana-characters here in this special lesson Although there are only a few hiragana characters, learning them can be hard because you have no direct use for them, and they all seem so strange in the beginning. People who say it should be easy are exaggerating. But using hiragana fluently usually takes a week to a few weeks, depending on how much you study. In theory, you can learn hiragana in a day. A lot of beginners stop because it’s hard learning something that you can’t use immediately, but believe me, the effort is worth it. So hiragana is everywhere in Japanese and I cannot stress enough how important it is to first start learning all the 46 hiragana-characters and make yourself comfortable using them.
#SENSEI KANJI HOW TO#
Even when you start learning kanji characters you will need small hiragana on the top or bottom of the kanji, called furigana, as a reminder how to pronounce the word. The hiragana characters are used for example with conjugations of verbs or adjectives, words that have no kanji character and often people will just write the hiragana characters of a word when they do not know the kanji. Nowadays, hiragana characters are used along with kanji. In time other people started to employ hiragana for its ease of use. Hiragana was used especially by women at the courts who did not receive the same education. Hiragana was developed around the 5th century as an easier way of writing out Japanese words.Īs the story goes, the kanji system was popular among the elite and men. Hiragana is the basic phonetic alphabet of Japanese and every sound that’s employed in Japanese can be represented with a hiragana-character and every word can be written out in hiragana.īut although it’s the building block of Japanese now, hiragana is actually derived from the originally Chinese kanji-characters first introduced in Japan. Although eventually you have to learn katakana and kanji to fully understand Japanese, without these you can get to a level of basic understand with only hiragana. In this lesson you will get some background knowledge on the different Japanese alphabets and some tips on learning them.Īfter being overwhelmed by the challenge that is Japanese, you can set your mind at easy. You can think of it as the basic alphabet that is used in English, although it’s not entirely comparable. Every word can be written in hiragana and as a beginner you will learn how to pronounce words first in hiragana and later in kanji-characters. This phonetic alphabet represents every sound in the Japanese language and is the basis for making sentences. The first step is always learning hiragana. Depending on how much time is spent learning it, it could take up to a few years to completely master Japanese. Learning Japanese is like the first 4/5 months it takes to train for a marathon. Learning Japanese is not a 100-meter sprint and actually it isn’t even a marathon. なにこれ!! (What the…?)īut don’t feel overwhelmed, is my advice. So you just promised yourself you are going to learn Japanese as a challenge and then you find out that you not only have to learn two phonetic alphabets but eventually a system of no less then a few thousand of originally Chinese characters.
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