Recommended music during the reading of these pages is: Ersaure, Ultravox,
Talking Heads, New Order or Human League
Well, thinking back on the more than 4 years I have now spent trying to learn japanese, I can only wonder why I am still not able to speak it fluently. I guess it is because most of the grammar I taught myself, I have never had the opportunity to practice. So why haven't I practiced some more?
The problem with Japanese is, that most words are completely different from what your or my mother tongue, so in order to have a meaningful conversation you got to learn thousands of new words. If you only know a few hundred words, conversating with others very quickly becomes extremely dull. But in order to get a decent vocabulary you have to read many books or magazines, and you can't do that if you don't know the kanji the Japanese letters. If you only know a few kanji, you will never get through even the first sentences of a book, and you will never expand your vocabulary, and you will keep on talking like a three year old kid... Therefore: LEARN KANJI!
But before you embark on a big project such as learning the thousands of kanji, you might want to get a little insight into Japanese grammar, and that is what this chapter is for. The major rule to remember while reading these chapters is:
Chat rooms are abundant on the net, and on many of them they chat in Japanese. Unfortunately they are often on Japanese pages as well, so they can be hard to find. Another thing you can do is: Get a Japanese penfriend! Many Japanese would like to learn English, and a good way for you to learn Japanese is to exchange letters half in Japanese, half in English with a native speaker. A very good site for finding pen pals, and for online chatting, is: Japan Guide. Try it!
Well, let's get started with the lessons. The following chapters will all be written in romaji, that is using western letters in stead of Japanese.
Kana means hiragana and katakana, two of the japanese "alphabets". Both consist of the same number of relatively few symbols. The kanji is the third group of symbols consisting of 1945 commonly used elements and further hundreds of less used elements, for instance for names or for use in only a few special words.
While kanji typically represent a certain concept, a thing, a verb an adjective etc., hiragana are used for a various of more generic purposes. They are used for certain basic word groups like particles, postpositions (prepositions in English), conjunctions etc., but they are also used to represent various grammatical inflections, like showing the time of a verb (past, present). Since they comprise all the sounds of Japanese they are used whenever you forget a kanji, since you can then still write the sound of that kanji with the hiragana. In children's books you often see more complex kanji deliberately written in hiragana. Note that some kanji are always written with hiragana, since nobody really remembers the original kanji, and using it will make your text look "old". Some kanji are written in kanji when they serve special functions, for instance is the verb "kuru" meaning "to come" written with kanji when the verb is alone, but if it binds to another verb, it is written in hiragana so that the other verb stands out more clearly, while the hiraganized verb takes on a secondary function. Lastly there are a lot of indiginous words that simply don't have a kanji, and therefore are written in hiragana.
Katakana, which also comprise all sounds of Japanese, are mainly used for words of foreign origin, for sounds words or exclamations and for some reason also for animal names although they are true Japanese words. Katakana are also frequently used in manga or magazines to enhance part of the text, giving the effect that capitalizing a word in English would do. Katakana are less curved and artistic, and was therefore also used on early computers, on LCDs and on telexes.
To learn kana start by downloading these images:
You can print them out and use them to see how to draw the hiragana and the katakana. Remember that the order in which you draw the lines (the strokes) and the direction is very important.Also get a Japanese font, like MSMincho, which you can download here.
With this font installed you will be able to view Japanese homepages with Netscape or Explorer. First, you have to configure Netscape to use the font with Japanese encoded webpages. This is pretty easy, though. On explorer I think it asks you the first time you try to view a Japanese page, and you can then install a font package.
There are 46 significantly different hiragana, and the same with katakana. These correspond to different sounds in the Japanese language. Some of them can be altered, by attaching an "umlaut" (two dots) or a circle. The kana can be put in a table with start-consonants out of one row, and end-wovels out of the other. So each kana represents a sound starting with a consonant, ending with a wovel. You have combinations of the following: _/K/S/T/N/H/M/Y/R/W and A/I/U/E/O and furthermore the single kana N. The _ means no start consonant. Two of the Y sounds are missing, they are YI and YE, and three of the W sounds are not used, WI, WU and WE. This gives: 10x50 + 1 - 2 - 3 = 46!!!
Now the K's can have umlauts and turn into G's
The S's can have umlauts and turn into J/Z's
The T's can have umlauts and turn into D's
The H's can have umlauts and turn into B's
The H's can also have circles and turn into P's
So now there are 25 more sounds, but there are no new kana to learn, just new sounds.
This simple representation of the Japanese sounds doesn't actually match the real sounds exactly. Therefire some kana are written a little different when written with western letters. These are:
It doesn't stop here though. The sounds can be expanded even more, by adding YA, YU or YO, to any of
the KI/GI/SHI/JI/CHI/NI/HI/BI/PI/MI or RI sounds. Thus they turn into sounds
like KYA,KYU,KYO GYA, GYU, GYO etc. When written with kana the last of the two kanji are written slightly smaller than usual, identicating that it belongs to the previous one.
This is 11x3 more sounds to learn.
Finally, for the katakana only, there are some extensions to support foreign language sounds, like TI or FA or the letter V. But let's leave them for a while, cause even the Japanese can't always seem to get a hold of how many of these there are!
So how do the sounds sound? Hmm, try and listen to japanese movies, that's my best answer. Or go get some training tapes from the library. Cause, to be honest, some of them sound like nothing you've heard before! :)
Practice writing all the hiragana first, cause you are gonna use them most. They look difficult, but actually they are easier to remember than the katakana because they are slightly more complex, and therefore more different. I used to use my association method on the hiragana (and still uses it!!!). I said something like (for hiragana):
KO = Couple, becuase the kana is a couple of lines
SHI = Sickle, beacuse the kana looks like a sickle
NU = Nude man bowing, the kana could look like a man bowing
and so on. Find your own! It takes time but it is fun. And then write them all, two times every day on paper. A fun thing to do is take some group of words, say Countries of the World, and then try and come up with as many countries as you can, writing them out in hiragana and katakana! Every day find a new group, and after a couple of days, go back and see if you can read the one's you wrote a couple of days ago.
And, by the way, go buy a good pocket dictionary, that also contain
pictures of the kana-tables. May I recommend: Random House: "Japanese-English
English-Japanese Dictionary", it is little, white and available at every
decent bookstore. Try Amazon.com. The book costs about
US $7.
[Chapter 1.2 - Some words]
The easiest thing to start with is simple words. It seems difficult in the beginning because they bear absolutely no resemblance with Latin or German, or whatever language you know. Except for the imported foreign words (gairaigo) that are written in katakana. Here are examples of imported words, see if you can guess their meaning ;)
Some are easy, others, like "suto" meaning "a strike" can be quite difficult. Remember that since "L" doesn't exist in Japanese, "R" is usually used. And "B" is often used for "V". Since Japanese words cannot end in other consonants than "N", a suitable kana with "U" or "O" ending is often choosed. The word "Kappu" from the above list is actually pronounced "Kap" where the last part of the word is very faint. So it relatively to the English word "CUP".
Here is a non-exhaustive list of real Japanese words:
I could name many more, but this is a start.
[Chapter 1.3 - Particles and copula]
There is also no gender, and no definite form (no "the"-form).
So the following sentences all render the same:
Koko = here
Soko = there
Asoko = over there
Doko = where
Kare/kochira/kono hito = this person
Sochira/sono hito = that person
Achira/ano hito = that person overthere
Dare, donata = which person
So, here is a veeeery simple Japanese sentence (whew, it took quite a lot of writing to get this far...)
I suppose you know the basic grammatical terms like subject, object, indirect object, predicate and so on. The word "wa" is a particle and belongs to a big class of words only found in japanese (at least they are not found in Danish or English). They indicate some grammatical property of the word they FOLLOW. So "wa" says something about "kore". It says that "kore" is the "theme" in the sentence. This often means that it is the subject too, but not always. The "desu" equals the english "be" in some ways. It is called copula, and has no meaning in itself, other than ending the sentence. A Japanese sentence should always end with a verb or copula (or "neeeee!!!" and other particles ;-) ) The copula only states, that there is a connection between the subject and the predicate ("isu"). You could say that the first "is" the other, or the first "chooses" the other, or the first "thinks" the other.
Thus while the following sentence:
Thus "wa" can often be translated to "as for" or "with regards to". You could, namely, also say (for the first sentence). "As for me,
I'm a student". See? By the way, "wa" is written with the hiragana "ha" but pronounced "wa"!
[Chapter 1.4 - Interrogative particle, object particle and verbs]
o
"o" indicates that the PREVIOUS (remember?) word is the Object of the sentence. "o" is written with the hiragana for "wo". Pretty smart of the Japanese to choose "o" and not "a", cause then you can remember that the Object is marked by o! So, when is there an object involved in a sentence? When there is a verb. And the copula was not a verb. Understanding the verbs is a very big part of the Japanese language, so let's have some verbs!
The verbs I list here are in the plain form, the form also used in dictionaries. This form should only be used in sentences that are on a non-formal level. After that form, I have written the formal version, the one we ought to use when speaking to other people. Verbs are all (I think) of Japanese origin, so you can't guess them:
Let's try and say, "I buy a bicycle". "I" is the theme, "bicycle"... must be the object of my purchasing, and "buy" is the verb that the sentence should end with, so:
Another one:
So the sentence means:
Proceed to chapter 2...
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![Hiragana [76K]](images/hiragana.gif){kind=link}
![Katakana [72K]](images/katakana.gif){kind=link}