Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji

Brendan forwarded us all an email from Chris who was in Japan on the schlarship last year. In it he pointed out a few things he'd have liked to have known before arriving. He also suggests that we teach ourselves the hiragana and katakana in the holidays, since we'll have to teach ourselves in the first week before lessons anyway. Now that I have finished my finals (yay!) I have set to work trying to memorise them.

Japanese script uses three alphabets: hiragana, katakana, and the kanji. There are 46 each of the hiragana and katakana, and they act a lot like our own alphabet, each having it's own fixes pronounciation and not meaning anything on their own. Hiragana are normally used to modify nouns and verbs, and also to provide the pronounciations of lesser known kanji (to which I shall get in a moment). Katakana are used to write foreign, imported words (of which there are quite a good few) and to write foreign names.

As of today, I pretty much know all the hiragana and have started on the katakana. I've been learning from the site www.japanese-name-translation.com, which provides a useful Flash animation that illustrates how to draw each character.

The kanji are probably what most people associate with Japanese (and moreso with Chinese). They are little pictures, each representing a word, and can be combined to produce more and different words. Supposedly, there are about 5,000 different kanji in existence, or which an average Japanese person will know about 3,500. The everyday, or jouyou kanji, are comprised of 1,942 symbols and are taught in the Japanese education system over nine years.

I'm planning to get ahead on my kanji during the holidays, and to this extent I bought another book today: "Beginner's Japanese Script" by Helen Gilhooly.