J-List side blog: Japanese language overview: Hiragana (the wavy kind)

Japanese 101 - An Overview

Welcome to Japanese 101, wherein I'll try to give you a bird's eye view of the language.

NOTE: To play the sounds in these pages, you should have the Quicktime web plug-in, preferably from QT 4.x. If you don't have it, you can click on the text directly for AIFF format pronciations.

Japanese is the language of Japan and Hawaii (ha-ha). The "standard Japanese" is the dialect spoken in Tokyo. Yes, there are many other dialects, notably Osaka's, called Osaka-ben (if you want to amuse some Japanese people, say "Osaka-ben ga wakara-hen!" which means "I don't understand Osaka dialect!" but said in Osaka dialect.) Like Turkish, Basque and Korean, it's an "agglutinating" language, which means that it puts a lot of information (passive voice, past tense, etc.) in the form of the verb, whereas in English, we have lots of helping verbs flying all around ("He would have wanted to have been there...") to express the same meaning. The word order is SOV (subject-object-verb), rather than the SVO that English uses, making for some challenges for United Nations interpreters.

Happily, Japanese is not a tonal language, meaning there are almost no words you have to pronounce a certain way to have the meaning carried, which is good for English speakers, who suck at tonal languages. Japanese also uses an enormous number of foreign loan words, so if you already speak English, you'll understand 40% of all technical-related vocabulary right off the bat (words like "illustrator" "character designer" "coordinator" "amenity communicator" and so forth). Finally, Japanese has only five vowels -- the same a, i, u, e, o that are in Spanish, if you speak that language -- there are relatively few "pronunciation challenges" in Japanese, unlike, say, French.

Japanese is almost definitely descended from Korean, since they share the same grammatical structures, although they're not officially related. If you want to have some fun, suggest to some right-wing Japanese that the Imperial Family is descended from Korean blood (it almost certainly is) and see what happens. Actually, suggesting that Koreans and Japanese are related to each other, to someone from Korea, might get you in a fight, too.

Writing Systems

There are three writing systems in Japan: hiragana (the wavy one), katakana (the boxy, squarish one) and kanji (Chinese characters).

The two "kanas" are syllaberies, meaning they're syllible-based writing systems (as opposed to an alphabet or pictograph). You could express, say, the sounds ka, ki, ku, ke, ke, and ko with these writing systems, but you couldn't ever write a k by itself -- it can't be expressed in either kana writing system, since it's not a syllable. Hiragana started out back in the sixth century (or thereabouts), supposedly created by Murasaki Shikibu, writer of Genji Monogatari, the first modern novel ever written, and was used for centuries as by women; the more boxy, bold katakana, with kana that look violent, like crossed swords, were used by men.

Today, hiragana is used generally for writing Japanese words (including grammatical particles, etc.), and katakana is used for foreign loan words (ice cream = aisu kuriimu, etc.), for writing foreigner's names, and so on. Kanji are the advanced building blocks for words, which make Japanese readable. You could theoretically write Japanese using only the two kanas, but this is impractical for reasons we'll discuss later.

Note about studying kana using this document: The correct way to learn kana is to learn to write it, and repeat writing it in a little grid until you've got it down. Since all kana and kanji have a "stroke order" (a pre-set way to write each symbol) that is an important part of the Japanese writing system as a whole, you are recommended to NOT try to "copy" any of the characters you see here, since teaching stroke order and correct writing method is beyond the scope of this document. You should learn Japanese kana and kanji with a qualified teacher, or at least, a good workbook that shows you how to make strokes (see below).

Here are some books that I've found on Amazon.com. Please note that I've only surfed to find some that look good -- I haven't used any of these books.

This should be a useful workbook for learning both hiragana and katakana. This looks like the newest one Amazon has.
This is a nice-looking kanji workbook. This is the second volume.
Interested in learning Kanji? Here's a workbook, although I've not always liked the "Power" series from this company.

Note about studying Japanese using romaji: Let me make a strong point here -- no one should ever allow a teacher to use a book that teaches Japanese in romaji. There exist textbooks in which a student would see all examples in Japanese, but written in the roman alphabet (i.e., "Piitaa wa Toukyou e ikimashita"), rather than in the Japanese writing systems of hiragana, katakana and kanji. Anyone doing this will cripple themselves seriously, learning to rely on romaji, and will have a difficult time learning to read actual Japanese. Further, the play between "how it's supposed to be pronounced" and "how it's supposed to be written" will be blurred dangerously, and such issues as, do English rules of punctuation and capitalization apply when writing Japanese in roman characters? will come up. Any teacher who allows students to learn Japanese using the roman alphabet rather than kana and kanji is a) probably lacking in self-confidence in their ability to teach something as "hard" as Japanese, and/or b) has serious limitations in their own Japanese ability, such that they should not be teaching. Trust me, and avoid any book or class that doesn't make you read everything Japanese in kana and kanji.

Let's Begin: Hiragana

Let's look at our first hiragana, the one for A (ah, pronounced as in "say ah" but with a tense mouth):

Beautiful, isn't it? Makes you want to take up Chinese brush-writing. This is the hiragana for 'A'. Unlike kanji, it has no meaning at all. Remember, these are syllables, just sounds -- there's no meaning associated with them at all, as there is with kanji.

Now let's look at the first five hiragana:

There they are. Pronuciation-wise, they are the same as Spanish, so if you speak that language, let 'er rip. The pronunciations are "a" as in 'far' (AH), "i" as the last part of 'free' (EE), "u" as in 'you' (OO), "e" as in 'end' (EH), and "o" as in 'so' (OH). Unlike English, there are never any other pronunciations whatsoever -- no spelling rules, no 'i' before 'e' or silent 'e'. Once you learn to read it, you should have no problems with pronunciation, except that you will have "lazy mouth" that all English speakers have (in other words, you'll tend to relax the muscles of your mouth as you pronounce, not tense them up as Japanese speakers do).

I'm going to hit you with the entire "main" set of hiragana now. They are:

They look formidable, but they are just there. A week of study with the right kind of teacher, or a good book, or flashcards, and they can be yours. Really. (Incidentally, there's a useful page that also shows you stroke order for this, see it here.)

(A little note about transliteration. Some stupid and possibly sexually divergent scholars transliterate the above characters for "shi" "chi" and "tsu" as "si" "ti" and "tu" to preserve the neat little consonant + vowel pattern, despite the fact that the pronunciations for these kana are "shi" "chi" and "tsu." When transliterating Japanese to English, the way to write these three syllables is a constant sticking point. My position is that "the way it's pronounced is the way to go," so I've written "shi" "chi" and "tsu" above. If you find writing "shi" "chi" and "tsu" as "si" "ti" and "tu" you should tell them that Peter said to stop the abomination immediately.)

Adding two little dots to some kana changes the pronunciation (or makes it from an unvoiced consonant to a voiced consonant, if you have a fetish for linguistic terms). The "ka" line changes to the "ga" line; the "sa" line to the "za" line; the "ta" line to the "da" line; and the "ha" line to the "ba" line. Adding a cute little circle to the "ha" line makes it into a "pa" line. See below:

You can pair up some kana to make some extra sounds, such as "ja, ju, jo" that couldn't be expressed any other way, by writing a kana and a "small" kana from the Y line. Three are listed below, although there are a few other sets (kya, kyu, kyo, etc.):

The following three hiragana are the "odd men out." The first is just "wa." The second, "wo" (sometimes written in romaji as "o" although I dislike this since it causes confusion with the other kana "o") is only used as a grammatical particle (it denotes the object of a sentence). Finally, the last hiragana below is the kana for "n", the only kana that doesn't end with a vowel. (Once, playing Trivial Pursuit, I pulled a question, "What is the only consonant in Japanese that doesn't end in a vowel?" and slam-dunked the answer.)

If you master the above, you can start writing words right away, such as 'sushi' 'nihon' (the name for Japan in Japanese), and 'watashi' ("I").

With Hiragana, you can actually express every sound in Japanese. So why not just use hiragana to express all written Japanese, and dispense with katakana and kanji altogether? The answer will be explained later. (But for a hint: think how much fun it would be to read a newspaper with all the words written in phonetic notation, as found in a dictionary -- there would be no "meaning" communicated to the eyes through the form of the words.)

Now it's time to show you some katakana...