[MoE]Japanese Lessons Part 1: Types of "Alphabets"

Day 2,549, 15:11 Published in Japan Belgium by sto kila bazuki

こんにちわ

First of all I would like to thank BODA90 for assigning me as Minister of Education and Minister of Culture and History, I hope that I'll meet his expectations. I believe that many of us are interested in learning the Japanese language. I'm not quite an expert in Japanese but I'll give it a try. It took me a bit time till I organize myself and I hope that RL wont interrupt me 😃

We have to start from zero so first we go with the alphabet.
Japanese writing system contains 3 main types of scripts, which are mostly used.

Hiragana:
This is the basic script and the mostly used one when learning Japanese. Some of you which are learning Japanese or simply watch anime and read manga 😃 have already noticed that Hiragana contains syllables.
ex: わ(wa) contains consonant "w" and vowel "a"
-Consonants are followed by vowel (く-ku, も-mo, に-ni, せ-se ...)
-Vowels can stand alone (あ-a, え-e, い-i, お-o, う-u)
-The only consonant that can stand alone is ん-n

Usage:
-Inflectional endings for adjectives and verbs. ex: 見る (miru, "see"), 見た (mita, "saw")
-Grammatical particles
-In cases when its better to use hiragana instead of Kanji. ex: Children's books, because it would be hard to understand for their age. Unusual kanji or not often used kanji, etc.
-Furigana (will be further explained)


Katakana:
Another script with syllabic characters, but this one is kinda different. The syllables have the same construction as Hiragana, but it has different characters and different usage.
Romaji:
a
Hiragana:
Katagana:
Usage:
-Transliteration of foreign words and names.
-Commonly used names of animals and plants.
-Occasionally, the names of miscellaneous other objects whose kanji are rare
-Onomatopoeia or words that are trying to achieve sound effect. ex: ワンワン(wan wan, Dog barking), ニャンニャン (nyan nyan, Cat meowing), ギャアアアアアア(gyaaaaaa, screeching tires), ドキドキ (doki doki, heart beating)


Kanji:
Kanji are adopted logographic Chinese characters, oh god not another thing made in China.
Most of the people who learn Japanese find Kanji hard, well that's because there are many characters and the strokes aren't quite easy to learn for some of them. In Japanese the most used are the Kanji characters, but dont you fear child even native speakers dont know them all.

Usage:
-Nouns
-Stems of most verbs and adjectives (the sample with see and saw)
-Japanese personal names and place names


Not so used
Furigana:
Those are the characters next to kanji to help around the pronunciation and the meaning. You have probably seen them in anime openings and endings, also when student transfers and writes his name on the board.


Ops wrong image



Romaji:
This literally means "Roman Characters". These characters aren't really used normally. The purpose is to help students that use languages based on the Roman alphabet learn Japanese by giving them characters they know how to pronounce already.


Thats all for today, more next time.
またね