Around the 9th century, the Japanese developed their own writing system based on syllables: Hiragana and Katakana. Of the two kana systems, hiragana is cursive while katakana characters are quite angular, as you will see.
Did you know that the Japanese people use a total combination of three (3) different systems of writing? They are: Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji (which is Chinese Writing).
Hiragana and Katakana each consist of 46 signs which originally were Kanji but were strongly simplified over the centuries. The pronounciation between Hiragana and Katakana is essentially the same, but they have different shapes, just like English has capital letters and small letters, script and printing.
Among the syllables are 5 vowels (a i u e o). The rest are syllables combined by one of these vowels with a consonant (ka ki ku ke ko ra ri ru ...). One exception is the n. In addition, many syllables can be softened or hardened by adding two small strokes or a small circle in the top right corner next to the character.
Again, Katakana is mainly used for writing loan words and the names of persons and geographical places that can't be written in kanji.
To start off, we are going to cover Hiragana, because learning Hiragana is enough for beginners to be able to learn Japanese grammar and learn some basic Japanese words. Before we start: Japanese characters are written vertically from top to bottom, and lines are written from right to left. The title of a book is on the right side of the front cover. Japanese can be also written exactly like European languages, i.e. characters are written horizontally from left to right, lines from top to bottom. Newspapers and novels are almost always written in the vertical way, and scientific books are almost always written in the horizontal way.
In the lessons, I will be showing the Basic 46 characters with a few examples of how they are written to form words. Also, I will show you the 20 Dakuon characters that go along with K, S, T and H.
Finally there will be the 5 Handakuon characters that also go along with H. Don't let all this scare you. In fact, it is quite easy.
Enough of the chit chat and let's get started.
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