Learning Japanese Online

Learning Japanese (Nihongo) starts with its alphabets.

Japanese has three main alphabets, these are the Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji alphabets.

There are five vowels within Japanese that you must understand before we proceed any further.

The five vowels are -

a - Pronounced: "aa"
i - Pronounced: "ee" as in "eat"
u - Pronounced: "oo" as in "hoon"
e - Pronounced: "e" as in "elk"
o - Pronounced: "o" as in "lore"

For example, the word Yoroshiku would be pronounced yoh-roh-shii-ku

Grasping the pronounciation of these vowels is important before we progress onto the first alphabet - Hiragana.

Note: If you want an excellent site that teaches the Hiragana and Katakana through mnemonics, then it is highly recommended you check out Learn The Kana.

Hiragana is perhaps the simplest yet most crucial alphabet to understand. By learning the Hiragana alphabet you will understand how to construct Japanese words as well as how to pronounce them. Since Japanese is a phonetical language, Hiragana covers every possible pronounciation of a word.



(Image courtesy of wikipedia.org)

Katakana is another phonetical alphabet and works in the same way as the Hiragana alphabet, but for foreign words. Any words that are not native to Japanese are written using the Katakana Alphabet.



(Image courtesy of wikipedia.org)

Kanji is the most advanced and difficult alphabet to learn, but is used in everyday Japan. Whilst every Japanese word is able to be written using both Hiragana and Katakana characters, it often requirs many characters in order to do so.

To circumvent the long process of writing lots of characters in Katakana and Hiragana to create words, Kanji is used. Kanji characters represent entire words, and often do not follow any particular "pattern" and must therefore be memorised.

Since there are over 2 thousand commonly used Kanji, it is not recommended that the student commence study of the Kanji alphabet until they have a good fundamental grasp of the Japanese language and its grammar.

Romanji is the latinization of Japanese words (spelling the words in letters, as opposed to using characters). Whilst Romanji is not used in Japan, it is a good substitute to use before commencing study of Kanji, and can be useful for students up until the intermediate levels.

There are a number of online resources that one can use to further their study of the Japanese language, however none of them come close to the quality of Japanesepod101.

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The course is incredibly fun, as the people teaching it are engaging and exciting. You will be guided through many experiences in Japan from the perspective of both the westerner and of the native Japanese. From the first lesson you'll be understanding elements of the writing system and be able to construct your first sentence in Japanese.

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