Here are some more basic words for you to get started with. It's important to learn all the words from each lesson as you go otherwise you will get stuck later on.
| English | Romaji | Kana | Kanji | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Good | ii | いい | ||
| Bad | dame | だめ | ||
| Yes | hai | はい | ||
| No | iie | いいえ | ||
| Hello | konnichi wa | こんにちは | ||
| Goodbye | sayonara | さよなら | ||
| This | kore | これ | ||
| That | sore | それ | ||
| Thank you | arigatou | ありがとう | ||
| F | I | watashi | わたし | 私 |
Whenever you see this symbol F like in the table above, it means that the word is Formal. In Japanese, unlike English, there are formal and informal words which are based on politeness levels. We will cover more on that subject later.
When you come across double vowels like in いい (ii) and いいえ (iie), the sound is held longer. Think of it like clapping for each character.
Therefor, いい (ii) will sound twice as long as い (i). This is very important to know because even changing the length can affect the words meaning. For example: いいえ means "No" but いえ would become "House"; You wouldn't want to call "obasan" (auntie) your "obaasan" (grandma) now, would you?
If you want to learn the pronunciations much sooner, it would be a good idea to study the Kana lessons first. This way, you can move away from romaji and start pronouncing words correctly; just be aware of Pitch Accent. For now, you can use a dictionary to find out more.
Additional Notes
Japanese Pronunciation is very different to English. Try to check other sites such as YouTube to hear these words being spoken by real life Japanese people. You may also use an online dictionary such as japandict.com that has audio and an image for pitch accent.
Some people believe that using a translation engine such as "Google Translate" is 100% accurate and can translate anything. Please, don't fall into that trap. A translation engine can only interpret text and most of it's analyses is done by an AI crawling the WWW so it can compare two or more similar pages in different languages to "guess" what certain phrases translate into then verifying data with contributors. Give it a try and you'll see how poorly many translations become.
