Learning a new alphabet isn’t as easy as it could be.

Read & Write Japanese

The basics of Hiragana & Katakana

When I started learning Japanese I asked for advice and discovered a lot of resources. This post outlines that process.

The view from Osaka Castle

I went to Manchester with Joe

In Japanese, we write

私はジョーとマンチェスターに行きました

Three different writing systems make up this sentence:

1. Hiragana — grammar and conjugation. Words like “and”, “at” as well as verb conjugation.
2. Katakana — foreign borrowed words such as “Joe”, “Manchester” and “hamburger”.
3. Kanji — ideas in historic Chinese, these characters were adopted into Japanese. “Tree”, “Fire”, “Go”, “I”.

To make this enunciable to speakers who can’t read Japanese there is a system called Romaji. There are no space characters in Japanese so different writing systems separate words.