Hello! Today's post will focus on language. Now, if you're anything like me (which is doubtful, but just go with it), you have a hard time deciding which languages you would learn if you could and why. What's easier for an American English speaker to pronounce? To write?
As you may know, I've been studying Japanese for a little while now. I'm not a beginner, but I'm nowhere near fluent (when asked, I say I'm about 1% there). My vocabulary is probably over a hundred words, and I have a pretty good understanding of pronunciation, but my interest in the language has recently died out, partly thanks to school stuff. But! now that I'm less occupied with homework, I took the time to seek what I could focus on next to keep moving forward.
The product: reading and writing.
Now, I've known for a while that Japan has more than one alphabet, knowledge that deterred me from learning it; I told myself I'd just learn to speak it first. But as I progressed I realized that most of the best teaching materials are in Japanese writing, not to mention the understanding that would naturally come with knowing how the words are composed. On top of all this, a well recommended book to teach one of the main Japanese alphabets was already in my possession, so at this point it was a "why not?"
The Part With the Information
So! First off, Japanese writing consists of three "alphabets," so to speak: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Hiragana and Katakana (both referred to simply as Kana symbols), are more like the English alphabet in that they represent phonetics and pronunciation. Meanwhile, Kanji characters are based on Mandarin (Chinese) characters that have been integrated into Japanese to express ideas or concepts. Scary already right?
(Note: most of this is a paraphrasing of "Let's Learn Hiragana," by Yasuko Kosaka Mitamura, p.9.)
