Hello my students and welcome to your first kana/kanji lesson.
There are three alphabets used to write Japanese, but for now we will start with the most useful and basic of them - Hiragana.
Hiragana can be used to write any Japanese word, and any written sentence is sure to contain some Hiragana. So let's start learning it.
Every character responds to a syllable, and one syllable only. There are no silent letters in Japanese. The vowel sounds are different than English sounds though - when you see "a i u e o" pronounce it " ahh eee oooo eh oh".
TO help you on your hiragana learning journey, I will now bombard you with internet resources. Yay!
This is a chart of all the hiragana. If you click the characters, it will say them for you:
http://www.tokyowithkids.com/fyi/hiragana_chart.html
This is a youtube video of hiragana being read to a dance beat. You can find related helpful videos in the sidebar:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWR1Ziynt8g
And finally, lots of games to play to help you memorize:
http://genkienglish.net/genkijapan/hiragana1.htm
http://www.fupa.com/play/Puzzles-free-games/htlj-hiragana.html
http://www.tamarillo.net.au/hiragana/learn_hiragana_game.html
http://www.learn-hiragana-katakana.com/review-play-hiragana-game/
This concludes your first lesson! Hiragana is so important to writing Japanese, I can't say it enough! Learning is a slow process, so our next few lessons will be about reviewing and checking our progress.
Questions? Concerns? Post them as a reply to this lesson. If you understood everything, write a reply that says something like " I understand and I will memorize this as soon as I can!" so I can keep track of who is actually reading each lesson!
Japanese Academy
A virtual classroom where beginners can learn to read and write Japanese. New students welcome!
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