Thank you for coming back for part two of my Japanese language course for beginners. As I mentioned at the end of the last lesson, this lesson will focus on the Katakana writing system. Katakana, as I mentioned in the last lesson, is pretty much only used for writing foreign words and by that I mean words not native to the Japanese language (such as America). All of the sounds from Hiragana are used in Katakana as well. The only difference is the way the characters are written. For reference check out the following table. 

Katakana Consonant/Vowel Combinations

*=rarely used 

As you may have noticed, many characters in Katakana are strikingly similar.  In particular, 「シ」、「ツ」 「ソ」、and 「ン」. You should pay careful attention to the stroke order and direction. Also, notice that the Katakana 「ヘ」 and it’s Hiragana counterpart 「へ」  look almost exactly the same.  That’s because they pretty much are written the same way.  You aren’t hallucinating. 

English words in Japanese

Many non-native Japanese words, especially English, have made their way into the Japanese vernacular through Katakana.  However, due to the limited amount of distinct sounds in Japanese and only 5 vowel sounds, it’s extremely difficult to keep the pronunciation the same as in the original language.  In situations like this, always default to the japanese equivalent pronunciation.  Take this list of sample words for example:

That about wraps it up for the first main parts of the Hiragana and Katakana alphabets. There is one more bit of information to review which will be included in part 3 of this free japanese language course. Come back soon.

The main alphabet – or syllabary – in Japanese is Hiragana. Since Hiragana contains all of the distinct sounds in the Japanese language and is the main alphabet, the first part of this Japanese language course will begin here. Katakana uses the same sounds as Hiragana but is used primarily for foreign/non-native words.

Besides Hiragana and Katakana, there is one other writing style and that is the infamous Kanji. Kanji is esentially a plethora of Chinese characters that the Japanese adapted into their own language centuries ago. Kanji is crucial though since it is used to separate words due to the fact that Japanese is written without spaces. Kanji is also useful for distinguishing homophones, which occurs very frequently.

Pronunciation

Now we’ll learn all the Hiragana characters and the proper pronunciation. Each character has a specific sound which makes pronunciation easy enough but since there aren’t very many distinct sounds (i.e, they start to sound alike), intonation is crucial.

The difference between English and Japanese pronuciation is that English is based on accents where as Japanese is based on the highness or lowness of a pitch. Homophones for example can have different pitches which result in a slightly different sound even thought the pronunciation is essentially the same. The largest barrier to proper and natural sounding speech is incorrect intonation. The best way to learn is to listen to actual Japanese, and pay careful attention to the intonation and sounds.

Below is a table of all the corresponding sounds in Hiragana. Most pronunciations are fairly obvious just by piecing the combinations together but there are a few exceptions which are noted in parentheses. There is also one consonant-only sound: 「ん」.

Hiragana Consonant/Vowel Combinations

To understand how this chart works, let’s start by looking at the right-most column, which are all the vowel-only sounds.

Here are some sample words for reading practice.
Example: あい – love (read as “ai”)

1. あう – to meet
2. いえ – house
3. おい – nephew
4. うえ – above
5. いう – to say

Each column represents a consonant sound with each of the five vowel sounds. For example, the “k” column has the following sounds.

「ん」 is the only character with no vowel sound. It adds an “n” sound as shown in the examples below.

• きん – gold (read as “kin”)
• おんな – woman; girl (read as “on-na”)
• おんがく – music (read as “on-ga-ku”)

If you’re looking for any additional resources, I recommend either Rocket Japanese or Nihongo Japanese Video Course. You can check out my reviews page by either clicking here or by clicking on the Reviews tab at the top of the page.

Tags: beginner japanese language course, beginners japanese, japanese language course, japanese language course resources, Japanese Language Katakana

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