For the second meeting of my Japanese class, I’ll be starting from the very basic of basics. Basics are always essential in learning something new, and it’ll help in future use. To start the lesson, today I’m learning the Japanese writing system. There are three kinds of characters in Japanese: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana and katakana represent sounds. For example, あ (hiragana) and ア (katakana) is read/sounds a. To differentiate hiragana from katakana and vice versa, hiraga has a round shape and is used for conjugation endings, function words, and native Japanese words, while katakana has a rather straight lines, and used for writing loanwords and foreign names. An example of of katakana is ラジオ (rajio) meaning radio. Kanji looks like just like Chinese characters, and that is because they are taken from there! It represent not just sounds but also meanings. Kanji are mostly used for nouns and the stem of verbs and adjectives. I have to memorize all these characters and I think it will take some time, but I can definitely do this!
For the next part of the lesson, I’m learning about daily conversations and with the right grammar. For this day and the next two weeks, I am covering the three first parts of the chapter, (include greetings), which is new friends, shopping, and making a date.
