You can start with translated versions of books like Disney or The Very Hungry Caterpillar. This way you can easily compare the translation to the original text to help grasp the sentence structure. Look for books by Mari Takabayashi while you learn hiragana. Her children’s books are written entirely in hiragana, but will challenge your mastery of the script. Guri and Gura are also a very famous series of Japanese children’s books that you can try as you become more advanced. They can help to build your basic vocabulary. Try manga. Once you feel comfortable with children’s books, try moving up to some manga as a gateway to more advanced reading.
Japanese sentence structure follows subject-object-verb format, as opposed to the subject-verb-object structure that English uses. Whereas an English sentence might be “I drink water”, the Japanese equivalent would translate literally to “I water drink” (私は水を飲みます). Japanese distinguishes parts of a sentence with particles - for example, は or が often denotes the subject, を indicates an object, で indicates the location of an event, に indicates direction or time, and so forth. These particles are placed directly after the words they refer to.
Choose subjects you like. If you are interested in music, get books that are at your Japanese reading level for that subject. If the topic interests you, you stand a much better chance of pushing through the reading and picking up more of the language.
Instead of practicing speaking, spend all your study time building your kanji vocabulary, learning grammar, and practicing writing.
Keep a kanji blog as you learn. It can take many months or even years to learn kanji. Having a blog makes it easy to look back and review the words you have learned. [4] X Research source Be patient. It will take a good deal of time and repetition to learn Kanji.
There are 46 characters in the hiragana script. [5] X Research source Each of them represents a vowel (a, e, i, o, u) or a consonant (k,s,t,n,h,m,y,r,w) + vowel. Use hiragana script to write participles and expressions, or words that are uncommon and might not be known by your reader. [6] X Research source Make flashcards of each of the hiragana characters with the phonetic sound they represent on the backside. Practice by going through them once or twice a day by saying the phonetic sound that goes with each character. Then try looking at the phonetic sound and writing the corresponding hiragana character.
Since there are no long vowel sounds in the Japanese language, all long vowels in katakana are denoted by a long dash “⏤” following the character. For example, “ケーキ” is how you say “cake. " The dash indicates the long “a” sound. The hiragana and katakana scripts can be learned in just a couple weeks if you practice them for a couple of hours each day.
Memorize. A good way of learning is to spend about a half hour to an hour a day memorizing and writing characters. Quiz yourself. To test if you’re remembering hiragana and katakana, try to write a certain group of sounds from memory. If you can’t do it, go over it again. Make a chart of all the Japanese sounds, then try to fill them in with the corresponding hiragana or katakana scripts. Keep trying daily until you can do all 46 for each script.
Write characters top to bottom, left to right. Make your horizontal strokes before vertical strokes. Make shapes in the middle doing strokes on the sides. Dots or smaller strokes should come last. Learn the proper angles for each stroke.
Write in hiragana unless some of the words are imported. You can choose to either write it horizontally (in which case you’d write left to right, as in English) or in the more traditional vertical fashion (in which case you’d write top to bottom, right to left). Write nouns, adjectives and verbs using kanji. Most of the words in Japanese are kanji characters that have been borrowed from the Chinese language. [10] X Research source Once you start writing kanji, make sure that you’re using the proper kanji, since some kanji have the same reading, but different meanings.
Just like in other languages, certain characters can be simplified slightly in the writing to write quickly. [11] X Research source While you don’t want to make your characters illegible, usually the context of the writing will help the reader to understand a sloppily written character.
おはようございます means “Good morning. " You pronounce it like, Ohayo gozaimasu. こんばんは means “Good Evening. " Pronounce it like, Konban wa. お休みなさい means “Good night. " Pronounce it like, Oyasumi nasai. さようなら means “Goodbye. " Say, Sayonara.
If someone thanks you, say you’re welcome. どういたしまして means “You’re welcome. " Pronounce it, Do itashimashite.
If someone asks how you are doing, let them know you’re fine. 元気です means, “I’m fine. " Pronounce it genki desu.
まっすぐ(massugu) means straight. 右(migi) means right. 左(hidari) means left.
