First Step to Learn Japanese Language
When you decide to continue your study for higher academic level (Bachelor, Master or Doctor) in any Japanese universities, first you must conseider to take intensive Japanese language lessons. Since we are not being in our country, we should understand that success in communication becomes most important thing must be achieved. How can we share our thought and idea while we can say anything?.
Same with other language, in order to communicate using Japanese language, rich vocabulary will become main key. Some people enrich their vocabulary by remembering the words written in dictionary. It is OK, but the first step to be done is about learning basic Japanese characters since Japanese people have their own characters to write any words (do not use roman characters like we always use).
As we have already known, interaction using language can be devided into 4 activities such as reading, writing, listening and speaking. Reading is the hotkey, if we are able to read, automatically we will be able to write, listen and speak with Japanese language. TO achieve good reading proficiency, here we will learn the basic Japanese characters, Kana, before falling into Kanji's lesson.
平仮名 (ひらがな)
Hiragana syllables developed from Chinese characters, as shown below. Hiragana were originally called onnade or 'women's hand' as were used mainly by women - men wrote in kanji and katakana. By the 10th century, hiragana were used by everybody. The word hiragana means "oridinary syllabic script".The hiragana syllabary consists of 48 syllables and is mainly used to write word endings, known as okurigana in Japanese. Hiragana are also widely used in materials for children, textbooks, animation and comic books, to write Japanese words which are not normally written with kanji, such as adverbs and some nouns and adjectives, or for words whose kanji are obscure or obselete.
片仮名 (カタカナ)
The katakana syllabary was derived from abbreviated Chinese characters used by Buddhist monks to indicate the correct pronunciations of Chinese texts in the 9th century. At first there were many different symbols to represent one syllable of spoken Japanese, but over the years the system was streamlined. By the 14th century, there was a more or less one-to-one correspondence between spoken and written syllables. The word katakana "part (of kanji) syllabic script". The "part" refers to the fact that katakana characters represent parts of kanji.
The katakana syllabary consists of 48 syllables and was originally considered "men's writing". Since the 20th century, katakana have been used mainly to write non-Chinese loan words, onomatopoeic words, foreign names, in telegrams and for emphasis (the equivalent of bold, italic or upper case text in English). Before the 20th century all foreign loanwords were written with kanji. Katakana are also used to writ Ainu, a language spoken on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido
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