Hiragana: Is one of 2 Japanese phonetic (each letter represents a sound) alphabets called "Kana" . The sounds used in Japanese are a bit different from what we are used to. There are 5 basic vowel sounds: A ("a" like in "paw"), I ("ii" like "Hawaii") U ("u" like "Rumor") E ("e" like in "Pet") O ("o" like in "show") All other sounds are a combination of consonant and the vowel sounds we just learned. Instead of a letter "K", we have "ka" "ki" "ku" "ke" and "ko". The exception is the "N" sound, which can be used by itself. On the card above, we see "Te-ya-n-de-e", Yattaro's (Speedy's) catch phrase. It doesn't really have an English translation, but it means something like "Watch out!" or "No way!".
Japanese doesn't have an "L", the "R" sound is used instead (but the Japanese "R" sounds a bit different than what you are used to hearing in English), there is also no "Q", or "V" as used in English.

Katakana: Is another alphabet, the sounds are the same as those found in Hiragana, but Katakana is mostly used to write foreign words. Recently a katakana form of "V" was introduced to be used on foreign words by adding the " to the U katakana. Katakana is generally more angular looking than the more rounded and flowing Hiragana. On our collector's card above, "Cat" has been written in Katakana. Since Japanese sounds are different than English, it is written "Ki-ya-tu". Sometimes a slightly smaller Hiragana/katakana letter is used after a normal sized one to influence the sound of the first one (although it might be left full sized, depending on the person writing it), by using a small "ya" after the "Ki", we get a "Kya" sound. The "tu/tsu" katakana is also written in the small size, this shows that it "doubles" the consonant following it (which in this case is a "T" from the Kanji "Tou", which we will get to in a moment). So here the English "Cat" becomes "Kya-t(u)".

Kanji: Based on Chinese writing, each character is a word, or even a couple words. These are the most complex to learn. The most complete Kanji dictionaries list over 50,000 different Kanji! But only about 3,000 of these are normally used in newspapers and magazines. Even Japanese aren't expected to know every Kanji by heart, the average person might know about 1,000, and that would account for over 90% of the ones they are likely to come across in normal reading. If you look closely, you'll see some Kanji have small characters near them (hiragana or katakana). These are phonetic pronunciations of the words to help people who haven't yet mastered all of the Kanji to read the word, or to help out with more uncommon Kanji the average person might not know. You'll often find these sometimes when Kanji is written somewhere that children might be reading it, since Japanese children will learn Hiragana and Katakana before they have learn the much more complex Kanji. Kanji can have more than one meaning, the ones circled above say "tou" (group), "nin" (sneaky, secret, endure), and "den" (legend, tradition), but put together. The word you often see in TV and movies, "ninja" comes from "nin" (secret) plus "shiya / shya" (person). Here we have a group of such people; "tou+nin", and "legend"= "den". All together we get "ninja legend". Along with the Katakana and Hiragana, we get the Japanese title "Cat Ninja Legend, Watch Out!". Pronounced in Japanese, it sounds like "Kyat-tou Ninden Teyandeh".

Romanji/Romaji: Is the same as our alphabet, you're reading Romaji (Roman) letters right now. Romaji isn't used often for writing in Japanese, but all Japanese learn this alphabet, since English words are often used. But sometimes it's just used because it's more exotic to Japanese and they think it looks cool. You'll often see Romaji used in advertising and media as an attention getter. On the picture we see the name of the Pizza Cat's hometown (in the Japanese version of the show) "Edoropolis". You might also notice it has been written in small Katakana above the Romaji to help out kids who haven't learned Romaji yet.

Now then, if you're saying to yourself, "this is all way too complicated for me!" Don't worry, you don't actually need to learn to read and write in Japanese if you just want to learn a little Japanese to enjoy your favorite anime a bit more, or order some sushi. The main purpose of this first lesson is to clear up a bit of the mystery of what to many people looks like an impossibly complex language. By learning what sounds are used in Japanese (and which ones are not), it becomes much easier to remember and pronounce Japanese.

Here on this chart (which I borrowed from http://joyo96.org/) you can see the sounds you'll need to speak Japanese. Notice it starts with the 5 main vowel sounds we talked about, then adding these vowel sounds to the different consonants, we get the Japanese "alphabet".

Did you notice that the kana for the G, Z, D, and B look exactly like the K, S, T, and H kana but with a small " mark added? This mark just slightly changes the sound, changing (for example) "ka" to "ga". Notice in the word "Te-ya-n-de-e" on the picture at the top of the page the first letter "te", and the fourth letter "de" look almost the same, but if not for that little mark (shown as paw prints in the title) it would say "Te-ya-n-te-e". The "P" sounds are the exception, they look the same as the "H" and "B" sounds, but instead of the " they have a small circle mark.

That concludes our first lesson, I hope it helped make Japanese a little less mysterious. In our next lesson, we'll start putting these sounds to use when we start learning some common Japanese words.
-Violet BACK