Introduction to Japanese: Writing system

こんにちは！

How to write and read in Japanese?

The Japanese language may look complicated at first, but trust me, it's not. As a matter of fact, once you master the logic behind the sentence construction, you will find out that Japanese has the easiest grammar you could imagine.

But before jumping into grammar, let's face together the most difficult part of japanese, its writing system! In the Japanese language, 3 different alphabets exist and are combined to form sentences. If most people start studying japanese by learning words they write in "romaji", according to my own experience, you should absolutely start your japanese adventure with Kana (Hiragana and Katakana).

Hiragana (平仮名）

In case you are struggling with the pronunciation, I would recommend you this fun (but so useful!) video:

As you can see, Hiragana, being inspired from a special Chinese writing style called "sosho", have a very specific cursive shape. Initially, Hiragana were mainly considered as feminine therefore solely used by japanese women, who did not have access to as much education as men at that time.

As a matter of fact, I would advice you to check and eventually read "The Tale of Genji", a japanese classic novel which participated to democratize Hiragana as part of the japanese language.

Katakana (カタカナ）

There are as many Katakana as Hiragana. They are pronounced the exact same way but differ in their writing. As you can see from above, the shape of these characters is angular and differ drastically from the circular shape of Hiragana.

Are you wondering why using Katakana instead of only using Hiragana? It would be more simple you say? Well...HANBAAGAAA!!!

You think I have gone mad? If you think so, I will let you enjoy one more video, THIS is how japanese people pronounce english words:

Did you survive? (I am terribly sorry for you english speakers...)

Indeed, as you have now understood, Katakana are only used in the japanese writing system in order to write / proceed to the transcription of foreign words and for most onomatopoeia. If most of these words come from the english language, some are even transcripted from french for example!

Here is the exhaustive list of Katakana, have a look!

Make sure you learn how to recognize and write every these characters. You will probably take more than a few days to succeed, but once you do, you will be rewarded, trust me. Learning japanese certainly is a challenge, since it is one of the most difficult language to learn. Especially if you are not from asian countries because, you will see during your journey to mastering japanese language, that even constructing your sentences will require you to think completely differently from what you normally do!

If you have questions about this article, please contact me, I will be more than happy to discuss with you about Japan and my own experiences!

In order to do this, I recommend you to download Line, which is in case you never heard about it, the most popular and commonly used social platform in Japan!

Here is my Line account ID: antoine1302

また来週！

PS: now, you should know how to read the first word of this lesson, exception is, the は at the end of the word actually is pronounced わ ! (don't ask me why, this is part of the fun)