So you want to teach yourself Japanese? Part Two

What I love about the Duolingo app is that the first thing you learn when you take Japanese lessons is how to read and pronounce Hiragana - the most basic alphabet in Japanese and one you could conceivably use to write entire sentences in Japanese (excluding foreign-borrowed words that are always in Katakana) if you don't know any Kanji.

There are 46 standard Hiragana characters - and essentially, 46 standard sounds to be found in the Japanese language. We'll discuss modified characters/sounds later.*

The first row of Hiragana characters featured here are the vowels and they're the most important to learn. The good news - there's only five of them.

あ - a (pronounced like ah)

い - i (pronounced like ee)

う - u (pronounced like ooh)

え - e (pronounced like eh)

お - o (pronounced like oh)

There are a few Japanese words that are comprised only of vowels, such as あお (ah-oh) blue and  いえ (ee-eh) house. Most, however, are comprised of two or more consonant characters.

The next set of Hiragana is the k-set, as I like to call it:

か - ka (kah)

き - ki (key)

く - ku (koo)

け - ke (keh)

こ - ko (koh)

Some words that use the k-set and/or the vowels we just learned are: かお (kah-oh) face, かく (kah-koo) to write, and きく (key-koo) to listen.

Stroke order is very important when writing Japanese characters - even Hiragana - so follow this handy chart to learn the correct way to write each one. We've learned the two columns on the right (vowels and k-set), so you can practice writing those for now.

That's all for now (I'm actually writing this blog post at work) so for the next lesson we'll practice what we've learned using some new words and tackle the new two columns of Hiragana - the s-set and the t-set.

Find Part One here!

幸運！