wow, I found a REALLY awesome personal website that teaches how to read and write japanese - and i’ve been looking everywhere from japanesepod101 to rosetta stone.
If any of my followers are wanting to learn to read and write japanese, I highly recommend the sister websites: tofugu and textfugu. download the hirigana and katana alphabet charts and stroke charts from tofugu (which you can search in the search bar) and head over to textfugu. but explore tofugu too. the first page I read was this one.
the basic information you should know before diving into learning the language is this:
hirigana: is the basic alphabet - this is what children are taught first in school in japan. you can spell any and every japanese word with the 48 characters it consists of (charas like a, e, i, o, u, shi, na, ta, tsu, and so fourth).
katakana: is used for foreign words (like english words). it’s an exact copy of the hirigana alphabet sound wise. however, there are different characters for the sounds. “shi” will have two different charas - one hirigana, and one katakana.
kanji: are the more complex charas used to make sentaces shorter and easier to read, and to help convey meaning. kanji are actually a subset of chinese characters. There are over 5000 of them, but only around 2000 are commonly used and learnt in japan.
** If you’re a beginner wanting to learn, the first thing you need to tackle is hirigana. following that will be katakana and after you’ve learnt both of those you can move onto kanji. even though it sounds overwhelming, japanese is spelt exactly as it sounds (unlike english) so it’s rather simple! just polish your memorization skills! **
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