Lesson 1: ひらがな (Hiragana), カタカナ (Katakana), かんじ (Kanji)

There are 3 writing systems in Japan: Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji.

While it may seem like an epic task to learn these 3, Hiragana and Katakana are not too difficult with some perseverance.
Not only that, but people will be very impressed if they see you writing in one of these alphabets, even if what you write doesn't make sense.

I have some wonderful news too: The pronunciation in Japanese never changes! This means once you learn the pronunciation of a letter, you should be able to pronounce words perfectly.
There is one exception. The word は (ha) is pronounced "wa". But if it's in another word it's still pronounced "ha". Not so difficult.
Sometimes the end of a word will be very short too. For example, "desu" will often sound more like "dess".

• Hiragana
  Click to see a larger version.
  Hiragana is used in general writing, alongside Kanji.
  In manga, if there is Kanji, there will also be Hiragana written above it, so if you can read Hiragana, you will be able to read all manga.
  Most people recommend learning Hiragana first. Once you know Hiragana, you will be able to learn Katakana much faster, as they are quite similar.
  Not only that, but it's easier to find Hiragana to practice reading.
  
  
  
• Katakana
  Click to see a larger image.
  Katakana is used mostly for foreign words. If you can read Katakana, probably it will sound very close to the English word, so you won't need to learn new vocabulary. Luckily there are A LOT of words like that.
  Katakana is really useful if you visit Japan or play Japanese video games. It's rare to see full sentences in Katakana though, so it's not used much in manga, books or emails.
  
  
  
• Kanji
  Kanji are based on Chinese characters, and are the most difficult of the 3 alphabets, because there are thousands of characters, they can often be very complicated, and the Kanji offer no clue to their pronunciation. But to be honest you can live quite comfortably in Japan without being able to read Kanji.
  Personally I can only read around 100 Kanji at the moment, as I never really felt the need to study it.

Here are all Hiragana (on the left) and Katakana (on the right).
Click to see full-size.











And for a little extra clarification, here are all Hiragana.
Pronunciation is written in Romaji (the Roman alphabet) below.



あ い う え お
a i u e o

か き く け こ -> が ぎ ぐ げ ご
ka ki ku ke ko -> ga gi gu ge go

さ し す せ そ] -> ざ じ ず ぜ ぞ
sa shi su se so -> za ji zu ze zo

た ち つ て と -> だ ぢ づ で ど
ta chi tsu te to -> da di du de do

な に ぬ ね の
na ni nu ne no

は ひ ふ へ ほ -> ば び ぶ べ ぼ -> ぱ ぴ ぷ ぺ ぽ
ha hi hu he ho -> ba bi bu be bo -> pa pi pu pe po

ま み む め も
ma mi mu me mo

や ゆ よ
ya yu yo

ら り る れ ろ
ra ri ru re ro

わ を ん
wa wo n



As you'll be able to see, some characters are made by adding " or a small o to the top right corner.

There are some modifiers too that I will add later, but they pretty easy once you get used to the stuff above. Might cause some confusion if I introduce them too early.

SPECIAL RULES AND EXCEPTIONS

This is a place-holder for some extra information. It's probably too early to introduce it right now.

Practice: Hiragana

I'd like you to try to guess what these words are before clicking the spoiler links for the answers.
This is to help you test your reading ability, so don't try them until after you've learnt the Hiragana

すし

Spoiler:

まんが

Spoiler:

かみかぜ

Spoiler:

ありがと

Spoiler:

はい

Spoiler:

わさび

Spoiler:

からおけ

Spoiler:

からて

Spoiler:

Now for some sentences. I haven't checked yet if my Japanese is correct, but this is just a reading test, so it shouldn't matter.

ふゆ　は　さむい　です　ね？

Spoiler:

いま　は　に　じ　です。

Spoiler:

にほんご　は　すこし　むずかしい。。。

Spoiler:

でも、　はなしたい　です。

Spoiler:

まいにち　あめ　たべたい　です。

Spoiler:

でも　あめ　は　しぬほど　おいしい　です　よ！

Spoiler:

2 extra notes. At some point I will be putting the Romaji in the spoiler tags, so you will need to be able to read Hiragana and Katakana eventually if you want to understand without checking. I will wait a while though, because it does take time to learn 2 new alphabets.

Second thing, in Japanese there are no spaces. I'm adding spaces to words to make it easier to study.
Luckily Japanese people were usually understanding of this when I first started learning Japanese, so they would add spaces in their emails.
Once your vocabulary improves, you will be able to recognize words and won't need spaces.

Practice: Katakana

These might be a little more difficult, because these are non-Japanese words that are used in Japan, but use Japanese pronunciation.

Although generally the pronunciation doesn't change, sometimes some characters are said so fast that you can barely hear them.
For example, I could read a sign that says ブルーバード (buruubaado). I'll be there a while trying to figure out what it means, and then when Yuko reads it, she says "bulu bardo" - blue bird.

Katakana

チョコレート

Spoiler:

テスト

Spoiler:

ページ

Spoiler:

ホテル

Spoiler:

クリーム

Spoiler:

ビタミン

Spoiler:

タクシー

Spoiler:

ビール

Spoiler:

パン

Spoiler:

プール

Spoiler:

Japanese people LOVE to shorten words too, so the words below are words that have been shortened in Japan.


デパート

Spoiler:

コンビニ

Spoiler:

スーパー

Spoiler:

パソコン

Spoiler:

ジュース

Spoiler:

Here's a great Hiragana test that can be run from within this forum: LINK

Many thanks to StartGames for providing this free content.

thx for the guide!

However, when I went through the examples, I found some things, that sounded wrong to me. However, maybe I made a mistake there, so feel free to correct me.

- in the beginning, you introduced all the hiragana characters, and declared ふ as hu, shouldn´t it be fu?
- on the Katakana practices, I was a little confused. for example チョコレート, I would have read it as chokoreeto, wouldn t chokoretto be チョコレット?
-Bitamin
Vitamin
(There is no "v" sound in Japanese, so they usually use "b" instead.) From what I learned, there is indeed a Katakana Aditional Sound for V (ヴァ (va) ヴィ(vi) ヴ(vu) ヴェ(ve) ヴォ(vo)) however, they still write almost all words with "b" as japanese people have Problems pronouncing "v" and it was added rather recently, so most Words were left unchanged, after those Katakana was added. (if you were asking for a word, which actually uses a "v" sound, I couldn t even give you one)

if I m wrong, please correct me!

all the p sounds are rather hard to distinguish from the b sounds, is it possible to make the letters a bit bigger? I need to get really close, to actually see a diffrence in them...