Japanese Alphabets! (Four of them!) - Part One

Revisiting the Japanese Alphabets (syllabifies) lesson in Season 一 (ichi - one), 今晩 (konban - tonight.)

There are four 'alphabets.' They are ひらがな (hiragana), カタカナ (katakana), 漢字 (kanji) and romaji. Although he doesn't endorse spending a lot of time with it, I wanted to paste in this little blip from Koichi @ TextFugu about Romaji:

Fun Fact: You can break “Romaji” into two pieces. “Roma” (ローマ) is “Rome” in Japanese. “Ji” (字) means “character” or “letter.” Combine the two, and you get ローマ字, which literally means “Rome Characters.” Makes a lot of sense, right?

**Random observation/brain pick: It always feels funny to me when I'm trying to learn any subject and the introductory stuff are things I already know. Throws me off a little. I've tried a few different approaches with 日本語 so far, but I think that's OK considering that it's easily the hardest thing I've ever tried to learn. So anyway, feeling a little funny because I learned ひらがな (hiragana) by memory and My Japanese Coach on the Nintendo DS at an earlier point in my 日本語 studies. A little bit of カタカナ too but not so good with those. Ah well, don't see how it could hurt me too much. ;)**

In summary:

ひらがな - used for difficult 漢字, words with no 漢字, particles, suffixes and verb & adjective inflections

カタカナ - used foreign words, scientific words, onomatopoeia, emphasis and food

漢字 - most all vocabulary: nouns, adjectives and verbs; makes up a VERY large part of 日本語 written language

romaji - 日本語 written with Roman characters


I feel great about slowly but surely getting back in here. My brain is crowded but I occasionally write out the ひらがな chart still to make sure I remember it and I do pretty well for the most part. Really want to stick with this thing to the end and make my dreams come true. Sometimes it seems like I'll never get there and sometimes I don't even feel motivated to change that but I try to remind myself that this computer and language log are just sitting here waiting for me. Ready for moar!!!

Helpful tip from Koichi: Making tasks "actionable" - Components of a good to do list

1) Actionable tasks - don't be general; things you can actually act upon to get you closer to your goal
2) Short Term - Plan for the short term and make adjustments from there. Think about what you can do today!
3) Do Two, Maybe Three IMPORTANT things daily

I think I'm about spent for tonight. Hope to pick this back up 明日 (ashita - tomorrow)!!!!
またね!!