Learning the first 20 Hiragana

last night and today I have been practising and learning the first 20 kana in the hiragana chart!!

I have pretty much memorised them all though I do have to think about "ki" and ke" because I keep thinking that the kana for "ki" should be the kana for "ke" and the kana for "ke" should be the kana for "ki". I'm not sure why my self ether. So the next 10 I need to learn is the "na" and "ha" column. Yay, nearly half way there!!

Japanese Pronunciation Using Hiragana

To day is all about pronunciation!!!!!!! The pronunciation of "kana". A "kana" is basically one of the "letters" (well their not really letters but it's more easier to understand them in this way) of the Japanese "alphabet". The first 5 to learn are:

• a - is pronounced like the "a" in "car".
• i - is pronounced like "eeee", or the "ey" in "key".
• u - is pronounced "ooh", like saying "ohh ahh" when fireworks are going off.
• e - is pronounced "eh", like the "e" in "egg" or "elephant".
• o - is pronounced "oh", like in "oh my gosh".

The first five hiragana are the most important five to learn. They set the foundation for every other kana in the entire hiragana alphabet.

The hardest column of kana, for me, was the "r" (ra, ri, ru, re, ro) this is because it doesn't sound like an English r. It’s part R (around 75%), part L (about 20%) and strangely enough, part D (give this about 5%). Complicated or what. 

Then we went on to combo hiragana as you can see in the chart above it is just adding on a ya, yu, yo sound on to the kana. so pretty self explanatory. (in other words its getting late and I can't be bothered to go in more depth of an explanation :3)

Then comes the Dakuten. this is when you add two dashes or a circle to a kana to make it sound different. (Again it is shown in the chart above.) For example if you taken to the "ta" and add dakuten the sound changes to "da".

So to day I have hopefully learnt all of the pronunciations of the hiragana chart. yay, what's next?!  

Japanese "Alphabets"

Japanese has 4 "Alphabets":

Romaji
Romaji is the "Romanization of Japanese". it is the English alphabet.
Fun Fact - You can break "Romaji" into two pieces. "Roma" is "Rome" in Japanese. "ji" means "character" or "letter". Combine the two, and you get Romaji, which means "Rome Characters". Makes a lot of sense, right?
The reasons I'm not spending too much time on romaji:

1. There are too many different ways to write romaji.
2. Romaji will slow you down, in the long run. it will become a handicap in learning Japanese.
3. People don't use romaji in Japan.
4. Romaji will hurt your pronunciation. The English alphabet wasn't made for reading and writing Japanese.

Hiragana

Hiragana is used in...

• Difficult kanji: When a kanji is too difficult, a lot of times its better, easier and more common to write things out in hiragana instead.
• Words with no kanji: Sometimes there's a word that doesn't have a kanji... so, you get to use hiragana instead. (or katakana, depending)
• Particles: In English, this basically means all those little words that connect other words together. things like "and", "or", etc. when it comes to things like this, you'll be using hiragana.
• Suffixes: A lot of Japanese words end with suffixes. One big example is names. At the end of a name you'll often see the suffix "-san" attached.
• Verb & adjective inflections: The hiragana attached to a verb is what tells us if a word is past tense, present, negative, and more!

Katakana

Katakana is more angular, sharp, and full of corners. it has the exact some sounds as hiragana, though the symbols are all different.

The differents from hiragana: 

1. Foreign words: The Japanese use a lot of "borrowed" words. This includes things like foreign words. Borrowed words are converted into Japanese sounds. Sometimes they sound similar, sometimes they sound nothing like the original word.
2. Scientific words: Alot of scientific words are written in katakana.
3. Onomatopoeia: The Japanese love their onomatopoeia. These kinds of words are often used in Japanese daily lauguage.
4. Emphasis: It's kind of like when you italicize words in English. Instead of italicizing things, you can write them in katakana instead.
5. Food: Sometimes you'll see food items on a menu written in katakana.

Kanji

Kanji are the "Chinese characters" that make up a very large part of the Japanese written language. To get by really comfortably in Japan, you'll want to know around 2000 kanji.

Kanji was introduced to Japan via China multiple times over the course of a few hundred years. One Chinese dynasty would pronounce a particular symbol (kanji) one way, and another would pronounce it another way. Various Chinese dynasties kept on taking over China, thus exporting different kanji pronunciations to Japan over the years (depending on which Chinese dynasty had the most influence). Japan thought “hey, instead of replacing pronunciations, let’s just use all of them!” thus giving each kanji multiple ways to pronounce them. On top of that, the Japanese also applied their own (Japanese language) on top of kanji, which means there’s almost always a Japanese pronunciation for each kanji too (on top of multiple Chinese pronunciations). This makes kanji learning really tough and complicated for most people.

Kanji is made up of nouns, adjectives and verbs. Basically, anything you could consider "vocabulary" Probably is written at least partially in kanji, which is why you need to learn so many of them.