Saturday, September 25, 2010

Japanese Lesson #1: Hiragana

In this lesson I will teach you all about Hiragana. First a little history on them of course. Hiragana syllables developed from Chinese characters and were originally only used by women. This was until about the 10th century when it was used by everybody. The word Hiragana means ordinary "syllabic script".

In the earlier version of hiragana there were many different characters that represented the same syllable, but this was changed so that that every sound had it's own character to make things a little more simple.

Here is a nice little chart of all the hiragana along with romaji (pronunciations) underneath each character.


The hiragana syllabary consists of 48 syllables and is mainly used to write word endings, known as okurigana in Japanese. Hiragana are also commonly used in materials for children, textbooks, anime and manga, to write Japanese words which are not normally written with kanji, such as adverbs and some nouns and adjectives, or for words whose kanji are obscure or obselete.
Hiragana are also sometimes written above or along side kanji to indicate pronunciation, especially if the pronunication is odd or non-standard. Hiragana used in this way are known as furigana. In horizontal texts, the furigana appear above the kanji and in vertical texts, the furigana appear on the right of the kanji.
The way i found that works best for learning hiragana quickly is to learn one set a day, it may take a long time but if you practice all day long you will not forget it easily. I'm sorry about the poor quality of this lesson but its my first one so go easy on my please :P

Sunday, September 19, 2010

My First Post

This is just a little overview of what my blog is about. I will be adding japanese lessons at least once a week, i always have a youtube channel which i will be using in conjunction with this to be as effective as possible. So please subscribe/follow and look out for Posts!