Start your Japanese studies with our games for learning the katakana alphabet and the essential hiragana alphabet. Katakana is mostly used for writing foreign loanwords and names, and is used for adding emphasis in a similar way in which italics are used in English writing.įor further information on the three Japanese writing systems visit Omniglot's Japanese section. Katakana is a phonetic writing system, and the letters represent the same set of sounds as the hiragana alphabet.
For the famous Japanese classic 'The Tale of Genji', penned by noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu in 1008 used the hiragana script. Hiragana was developed out of Chinese characters in the 5th century, and was originally considered 'women's writing'. The hiragana syllabary consists of 46 phonetic characters. Hiragana alphabetīeginning your Japanese studies with the hiragana alphabet will familiarize you with Japanese pronunciation. Serious students of Japanese should learn at least a thousand characters. Many of these characters refer to specialist fields and are not known to many Japanese people. It is unknown exactly how many kanji characters there are in Japanese, but there are certainly several thousand. Words are often made up of multiple (compound) kanji characters following various rules. Kanji characters are ideograms each kanji character correlates to a particular word. Kanji script derives from the Chinese writing system, and the word 'kanji' literally means ‘Han characters’. The conclusion is - difficult! Most teachers and linguists agree. For more information on the challenges of learning Japanese read the LingQ article How hard is it to learn Japanese?. The greatest challenge in learning the Japanese language is the kanji writing script, which contains thousands of characters. The grammar is only moderately difficult to learn. Japanese is spoken quite slowly and clearly, which makes picking up words in spoken sentences quite easy. Although some sounds are different, notably the 'r', Japanese is not particularly difficult to pronounce and does not rely on distinct as many other Asian languages do. Furthermore, trying to communicate in Japanese will encourage Japanese people to communicate with you in English, which they are generally too shy to speak. However trying to speak some Japanese while traveling or living in Japan is worthwhile, and will be greatly appreciated by Japanese people. He found Japanese a relatively difficult language to learn, even compared to other Asian languages. The author of this website spent around one and a half years in Japan studying the Japanese language part-time. Is the Japanese language difficult to learn? In modern times numerous English loanwords have been incorporated into Japanese. Although Japanese uses the Chinese script, and a considerable proportion of Japanese words derive from Chinese, the languages are not related. Apart from the Ryukyuan languages of the islands to the south of Japan, there are no languages similar to Japanese, and the origins of Japanese remain unclear. Japanese is spoken by around 128 million people, almost all of whom live in Japan where Japanese is the national language. For learning Japanese vocabulary before testing with the practice quizzes, we host several Japanese picture dictionaries with audio as well as some interactive Japanese flashcards. Choose the Japanese topic you would like to revise, brush up on the phrases, vocabulary or characters, and then test your Japanese language skills with the language acquisition games. Unlike the mammoth task of learning the Japanese kanji writing system, the hiragana and katakana alphabets are fairly easy to learn and are a good place to begin studying the sounds in the Japanese language. We advise beginning with the hiragana alphabet section for those quite serious about progressing with Japanese. Japanese uses three writing systems kanji, katakana and hiragana. When learning words written in katakana and hiragana it is advisable to listen to the audio that features on the vocabulary list. Japanese study topics include vocabulary lists with audio for learning the correct pronunciation. Young kids will find the visual and colorful animals and fruit vocabulary games enjoyable, and visitors to Japan may find the phrases sections useful, as well as the numbers games and some of the basic vocabulary sections. Designed for use in Japanese language classrooms or as a self-study resource for independent students of Japanese.
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All Japanese acquisition games on this website are completely free to use, do not require registration or logins, and have been designed for Japanese language students of various ages, abilities and learning needs.
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