Kana Kanji Romanji

Excerpt from Self-Study Kana Workbook publised by AOTS

Origin of Kana

In ancient times, when no writing system had yet been developed in Japan, Japanese people tried to use kanji from China, which was a nation of advanced culture and learning, to write the Japanese language. Since Chinese and Japanese are totally different in pronounciation, however, it was difficult to adopt the kanji as they were to express the sounds used in Japanese.

Hiragana lettters were thus developed to record the sounds used in Jpaanese in written form, by modifying and simplifying kanji to make them easy for everyone to write. They have a round shape. Katakana letters, on the other hand, were derived from a part of kanji, and they are comprised of straight lines and angles. Both writing systesm were created some 1,000 years ago

To the beginner, learning Japanese will seem an undaunting task. However, its not that difficult to learn (Hiragana and Katagana, let’s ignore Kanji for the while). Essentially, there should only be about 40 characters to remember. The rest are derived from those 40 characters by adding a small double dash or a small circle. For example, “?” (ta) with double dash, “?” becomes “da”.

The trouble begins when you add Katagana to it. Now you have to remember around 80 characters. So for everyone character in Hiragana, you have to remember the Katagana form. And worst of all, they can be very different to each other, so you cannot really derive that Katagana form from Hiragana form all the time. For example, the character “shi”, “?” (hira) and “?” (kata), both forms looks totally different from each other.

Now, for many English speaking beginners, they will be very tempted to learn Japanese along side with romanised Japanese or Romanji. This is good, if you just want to hit and go, for a one off holiday, but if you are serious about getting it right, then learning with Romanji is not a good idea. Firstly, you will end up thinking of Japanese words in English alphabet, also you will tend to pronounce them based on the spelling, which can be close, but inadequent. For examply, “?” in Romanji is “su” and would end up being pronounced like “soo” in normal English, but actually its more like a short “seu”sound.

For a serious learning then, its best not to pick up dictionaries with Romanji pronunciation, but just with the English meaning and vice versa. This is especially true if you are picking up a Kanji dictionary. Its best to have those which teaching you have to pronounce Kanji in Kana rather than Romanji.

Now come Kanji. Life would be so much easier for the Japanese learning with Kanji. BUT life would be so much more difficult for Chinese speakers in Japan without Kanji. So even though we don’t understand Japanese, we can guess what its trying to say. The thing about Kanji is that its pronounciation is not consistent, so you don’t necessary know how to pronounce it all the time. For example, the Chinese character “?” is pronounced Daiwa (??) or as Otemachi (???) .

I guess the most difficult part about reading and writing Japanese is that all 3 types are used daily. So its not so easy to just learn Kana, but you also need to learn Kanji! For someone, whose Chinese is stuck a primary 6, its a new learning experience.

Now, as part of its history with China, a lot of the Japanese words are very similar to Chinese or the Chinese dialets. For example, “address” is “jusho” in Japanese, which sound just like “??” (zh� su?) and “world” is “sekai”, which sounds like the Hokkian pronounciation.

I must say that the only way to learn Japanese is to learn to read and write at least the Kana first. I spend about 2 hours each day at the apartment going: “a i u e o, ka ki ku ke ko, etc” and keep writing them and using flash cards to remember how to pronounce them. It will sink in after awhile if you are really into in. Anyway, I do hope that I can move around comfortably and able speak and read Japanese easily in one month’s time.