Now a day’s everyone wants to learn another language but
the main thing stopping them is where to start and how to manage their time. I
myself have been on the journey of learning five other languages so I understand
what it’s like to be so overwhelmed with languages. One language that I wanted to learn at some point that I'm going to talk about today is going to be Japanese. A great place to start
would be remembering Japanese characters. It’s always good to know the written
form of a language especially if you’re going there to travel or in order to
clarify things that you don’t understand verbally but might written wise.
So in Japanese there is combination of about three writing
systems. Those are kanji, hiragana, and katakana.
(This
is a Kanji chart used by 2nd graders from kanjiproduct.blogspot.com)
(This
a list of Hiragana pronunciations)
(This a list of Katakana pronunciations)
Kanji is by far the
most difficult writing system in Japanese since it based on a memorization of
characters that were based on the Chinese language. Hiragana is mainly used to
write grammatical markers and endings that cannot be found in Kanji. Whereas katakana
is used to write foreign words that have been adapted in the Japanese language
like computers and systems.Now in order to remember these characters you must grasp the use of stroke order, which is the way characters are written. When writing a character you must begin at the top then go down from left to right. Not only will it help you with writing characters correctly but you’ll be able to have a better memorization of the characters. For example, let’s take the number 4 in Japanese and write its stroke order.
You notice how the character goes from the left up then the
right down? This is how most characters are written. This is also Kanji by the
way but don’t worry about remembering all Kanji (there’s like 40,000 kanji to
remember) but the most basic one’s like numbers is a must. I prefer learning
Kanji from textbooks but I like most am on a budget so I go hunting for my material
on eBay where I can find $30 textbooks for only $10 sometimes. For example a book I’ve
been looking to buy lately called “Crazy for Kanji: A Student's Guide to the
Wonderful World of Japanese Characters” sales for about $19 dollars on average
but I found it eBay for $8.77 WITH free shipping!
I hope you guys found my guide interesting! Happy language learning!
