Kana (Part I)

Now, I think it's the best time to start learning some Kana. You know, those funny symbols Japanese writing have? We're now going to cover some of them now.

Before we can really learn Japanese, we need to be able to use Kana. Kana refers to both Hiragana and Katakana, which are two of the writing systems used in Japanese.

The other system is Kanji. It's far more complicated than the other two. We'll come back to them later when you are more comfortable using Kana. For now, let's start with learning Hiragana first.

There are two kinds of sounds in any language.

Hiragana and Katakana, just like English letters, represent sounds. Katakana is normally used for loan words and foreign names but may also be used to emphasis words or indicate onomatopoeia as well as many other uses.

Kanji originates from Chinese characters and represents not just sounds but meanings too.

There are 46 basic Hiragana characters, which we shall hope to memorise. Once we have covered all Hiragana and Katakana, we will start replacing Romaji.

Vowels ( あ い う え お )

Here are the first five characters. Be sure to correctly pronounce them and practice actually writing them down too. The letters we are covering now are vowels. Unlike English A E I O U, Japanese vowels are ordered as A I U E O.

Also, unlike English, these sounds never change. They will always sound the same; あ will always sound like "ah" not "ay" or "ou" as it may happen in English with many word such as the A in "cake", "man" or "auto".

K Group ( か き く け こ )

Here, you'll find each character that starts with K and is followed by one of the vowels. This pattern is followed by most of the kana.

As you learn even more Hiragana, you'll be able to stop writing in English letters. We'll even continue lessons soon that will dismiss English letters so be ready. Here are some words you should already be able to write. Try them out:

G Group ( が ぎ ぐ げ ご )

If we only had the 46 Hiragana characters to choose from, Japanese wouldn't have many ways to pronounce words. Adding more however isn't such a very good solution either.

Instead, we can place little symbols next to a character to show that it is read differently. The symbol I'm going to cover now is called the dakuten (also known as a tenten)

The dakuten looks like quotation marks in English. It's placed in the top right corner of a character. Not all characters can use a dakuten, though.

All "k" characters can use a dakuten. Putting a dakuten on them gives them a sound "g" instead of a "k" sound.

Go ahead and practice these some more, and we'll cover more Hiragana characters again soon.

Stroke order is very important in Japanese so I suggest searching for them before practicing to write. Don't forget that the way you write something is much more important in Japanese than it is in English!

Long Vowels

When the same vowel is placed after the other, the pronunciation of that vowel becomes twice as long. It's important to hold the sound long enough, because the length of these sounds will likely change a given word into another.

Here, let's look at the words obasan and obaasan. Notice the single ("a") and the double ("aa") vowels and how the extra "a" gives it a different meaning:

If you try clapping to each syllable, you should hear the difference between short and long vowels (the second example above has one extra clap)