JAPANESE CHARACTER

Let's learn Japanese language

When studying about japanese language, it's hard not to touching with Japanese characters.

There are 3 kinds of characters used in Japan:

1.      Kanji

Long time ago, Japanese doesn't have letter, so they adopt the letter from Chinese, that is kanji. There are so many kanji, maybe about tens of thousands.

But now, that amount was decreased to about ten thousand letters "still heavy tough lol". But if we keep learning one by one, step by step, believe that we can.

Every letter in kanji have it's own meaning and pronounciation. Some kanji have more than one pronounciation.

Kanji have unique form because it made from picture, for the example kanji for tree are the same like a picture of tree. Moreover, kanji is like a building blocks. you can have a new kanji from joining two or more kanji into one. For example kanji for trees were made from two kanji of tree. And kanji for forest were made from three kanji of tree.

     

2.     Kana

Besides kanji, there are kana. Kana are character that originally made by Japanese. Kana were made from modification of kanji. But kana doesn't have meaning, kana only have pronounciation and form.

There are two kinds of kana:

1.         Hiragana 

Hiragana usually used to write original words from Japanese that don't have kanji. Besides, hiragana also used to write how to read the kanji. And basically for us who don't memorize much kanji yet, we can write it in hiragana.

2.         Katakana

Katakana usually used to write the words from other language. This kind of letter used to differentiate between words from Japanese or from foreign country. Name of animal sometimes used katakana to write it.  

3.      Romaji 

Romaji is the name for the Roman or Latin letters. Romaji rarely used in Japan, but to us who are still learning, romaji can be useful for learning Japanese characters above. example for me, i used it to read the lyrics of the anime song.

Japanese character maybe hard and difficult to learn. But like what proverb said, stone will be destroyed by water droplets. Ganbatte.