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           Want to learn Japanese and have no idea where to start with? Here you are. From

this site you might find some usful infos about Japanese.Let's start with the basic.

           There are three basic writing systems used in Japanese, hiragana, katakana, and

kanji. Just like learning English, people usually start with learning upper and lower case of

alphabets and being familiar to the sound of each one. Hiragana can be defined as the

Japanese alphabets. This writing system is used frequently in Japanese.  There are 46

basic hiragana characters. The first 5 characters on the Hiragana Chart are the short

vowels.

    A sounds like the "a" in the word "father".

     I sounnds like the "i" in the word "fish".

    U sounds like the "u" in the word "bush".

    E sounds like the "e" in the word "telephone".

    O sounds like the "o" in the word "so".

It's very important to know how to read these vowels correctly because the following 39

characters can be read easily just by adding English consonants. Please note that the 40th

character is read as "o" but not "wo". The last character sounds like "n" in the word

"ten".

           There are also 46 characters in Katakana. However, you don't have to worry

about memorizing more sounds. In fact, each Katakana has a counterpart in Hiragana.

Katakana is used to express foreign names, places, and words.

           The most complicated writng system in Japanese is Kanji. Kanji are simplied

Chinese. Each Kanji has more than two possible reading sounds. For the low-level

readers such as children hiragana will be the major writing system. However, for the

high-level readers Kanji is used frequently for books, newspapers, and magazines.

           In addition to these three major writing systems, Romanji sometimes is used but

only for foreigner who can not read Kana and Kanji.

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