Learning Japanese! Progress so far... (Part 1)

Coming to Japan, one of my goals is to learn Japanese. Though I had traveled here before, I never made much of an attempt to learn Japanese beyond the very basics (thank you, hello, etc). 

My journey to learn actual Japanese in early 2020 after I became shortlisted to the JET Program - at that time it became clearer that I would be going to Japan at some point, but little did I know it would be over a year before I actually made the trip. 

My first task was to learn the Japanese alphabets. For the uninitiated, Japan uses two main written alphabets plus kanji. The first two alphabets are hiragana and katakana. Hiragana is the main alphabet used for Japanese words whereas katakana is used for foreign loan words, or in other words, words that are used by Japanese but are not originally Japanese.

(Please note that my use of "alphabet" might be slightly incorrect here - there might be a more proper term for what hiragana and katakana are, but I will continue to use alphabet for now.)
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Both hiragana and katakana contain 46 characters (you can think of these similar to letters). And, while there may be some exceptions, you will find the same sounds represented across hiragana and katakana. For instance, the sound "a" (pronounced like "ah" in English) is represented as あ in hiragana and ア in katakana. The difference, though, is in usage - you would use the katakana "a" (e.g. ア) if you were writing a foreign loan word whereas you would use the hiragana "a" (e.g. あ) if you are writing a native Japanese word. 

There are many words in Japanese that are not originally Japanese - such as the Japanese word for "coffee" which is "ko-hi" or in katakana コーヒー. Because the Japanese borrowed this would from Dutch traders in the 1600s, they write it using katakana and not hiragana. Again, showing that the word has foreign roots. (see video pronunciation of "coffee" below)

And then there is kanji, which is of Chinese origin and was used by the Japanese to represent combinations of hiragana. From what I have learned so far, Japanese kanji and Chinese kanji share a lot of similarities, but there are cases in which the same kanji might have different meanings depending on whether it is Japanese or Chinese. For reference, a school educated Japanese person should know about 2,000 kanji symbols! For further reference, your author knows almost no kanji. 😂

Train Station Sign, shows Kanji and Hiragana

The train station sign above shows an example of Kanji and Hiragana - at the bottom you see the train station name in English (also known in Japan as romaji) - Akihabara. At the top, you will see "Akihabara" represented in kanji - 秋葉原. And in the middle, you will see the same word, but this time in hiragana - あきはばら. The kanji and the hiragana mean the exact same thing - Akihabara.

You could also write this in katakana as well (it would be アキハバラ) but you would never see it written this way because Akihabara is a true Japanese word, thus no need to write it in katakana. Also, another thing to notice - the Kanji spelling uses only 3 symbols, whereas writing it in hiragana uses a total of 5 symbols, thus kanji would be a quicker, shorter way of writing the same thing, hence why kanji is used in many situations (it is more efficient).

I will not talk a lot about romaji much here outside of what I mentioned earlier, but you can think of romaji as yet another way to write Japanese. It is a way to transcribing the sounds of Japanese hiragana and katakana into English/Roman script to make it easier for English speakers to figure the word out. Knowledge of romaji is not common in Japan (I have been with several cab drivers who do not know romaji). But, if you are interested, you can find out more about romaji here.

So, for instance, taking the sounds of what I mentioned earlier in hiragana (あきはばら), you could translate each hiragana character into its English/romaji sound equivalent to get Akihabara. However, to say Akihabara properly in Japanese, you would still need to know proper Japanese pronunciation (for instance the final "ra" sound is actually pronounced more like "la") but it would make things easier for you (ah-key-ha-ba-la).
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I wrote a bit more about my experience learning Japanese beyond what is here, but I will save that for a "Part 2" that I will post next week. So, stay tuned for that!

​All the best,