How to Learn Japanese by Simon Reynolds

Author:Simon Reynolds [Reynolds, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Free-eBooks.net
Published: 2010-03-06T20:09:01+00:00

Writing right

This chapter will actually cover both reading and writing as they are obviously closely intertwined.

When learning to read and write Japanese you should learn in this order: katakana, hiragana and kanji.

By learning katakana you will be able to understand many English loan words. Katakana are simpler and more angular than the hiragana.

Hiragana are necessary to start understanding Japanese and you can write Japanese entirely in hiragana if you do not understand kanji. Hiragana have a more rounded and flowing shape.

Kanji are the hardest to master and should be left until you have fully mastered the kana. The sooner you can move away from the crutch of romaji (Roman letters) the better. Stroke order

Both kana and kanji have a designated stroke order (kakijun). It's quite tempting for an English speaker to ignore correct stroke order, reasoning that it doesn't matter if the characters look OK and that learning the characters is hard enough without worrying about stroke order. Don't give in to temptation! Stroke order is very important and you are shooting yourself in the foot if you ignore it.

Correct stroke order will help make your handwriting legible and becomes quite intuitive after a while. The basic rule is to start in the top left corner and finish in the bottom right hand corner. There are rules for drawing boxes and other common shapes. Wikipedia has a nice explanation of stroke order here.

If you know the number of strokes in a kanji, you will be able to look it up in a dictionary without knowing the pronunciation or the reading. To be able to count the strokes it is essential to have a solid grasp of correct stroke order. If you don't know the stroke order for a character, check it in your dictionary or online. Once again, stroke order is important so get into good habits from the start.

Learning the kana

It is possible to learn the kana (hiragana and katakana) through brute memory in a fortnight or so simply by writing them out over and over again but I really don’t recommend doing this. As we have seen, the kana have only one pronunciation each. They have no inherent meaning like kanji and are only used to represent the sounds of Japanese.

Flashcards

Several publishers produce some rather good mnemonic cards for the kana and using these should save you time as well as aiding your retention. Try Kana Flashcards. Free printable kana flashcards can be downloaded from here, however, these cards do not come with mnemonics or stroke order. You can try making your own; e.g. the character ki looks like a key, the character ma looks like a mast etc.

It's a good idea to follow the kana table and review each row before going on to the next one i.e. start with a, i, u, e, o and go on to ka, ki, ku, ke, ko and so on. You could even try learning katakana and hiragana simultaneously as some of the shapes are similar and some flashcards come with both on them.

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