Learn ALL the Japanese Kana Together
Intro
The Japanese language uses 3 different writing systems.
The first 2, Hiragana and Katakana, are PHONETIC, which means they represent a sound. Together, they’re known as the “Kana”.
Hiragana
Hiragana can be used to spell out ANY word in the Japanese language.
Katakana
The katakana represent mostly the SAME sounds as hiragana, but THEY are used for foreign loan words and names, to indicate robotic speech in literature and subtitles, people speaking with accents, and to list the pronunciation of words in dictionaries.
Technically, you could write EVERYTHING in Japanese using just hiragana or katakana, but because of the extremely large number of homonyms in the Japanese language, and for historical reasons as well, a 3rd system is also used:
Japanese Kanji
You can learn more about THOSE in other courses on this site, and a TINY bit about them on this page, as well.
Hiragana is often written ABOVE kanji to show you how to READ them phonetically, because kanji tend to have meanings and MULTIPLE phonetic readings, depending on the word they are a part of. The characters above the kanji are referred to as "furigana".
漢字
Japanese is written with a combination of all 3 of these writing systems, but today, we’re focusing on just the kana.
How This Course Will Work
We’re going to learn each hiragana character ALONG with its corresponding katakana character, and I’ll go over HOW to memorize them as we learn the first 2 characters.
Why learn hiragana and katakana at the same time?
We believe it’s helpful to think of hiragana and katakana as similar to upper case and lower case English letters. Furthermore, the design of each is often based on the exact same kanji. For these reasons, and more, it seems much easier to memorize hiragana along with their respective katakana, than memorizing them separately.
Free writing worksheets
Where we will start
We’re going to start with the 5 vowel sounds in Japanese. There are 5, and ONLY 5.
