Author: Faisal

Introduction

Having an interest in learning the Japanese language is great and all, but how do you ACTUALLY get started? Given the fact that you need to learn Hiragana, Katakana, sentence structure, vocabulary words, kanji and more, it can be a daunting task. This is really a catch 22, if you don’t start somewhere, you won’t get anywhere, but you might be totally confused on where to start. This can lead to a very lengthy delay in when you had the initial idea of learning Japanese and when you actually started learning. There are many guides out there, and I’ve definitely done my fair share of reading through them, but I thought I’d give you my take on it as well. This is going to be geared more towards just starting out with Japanese, without any formal exposure to the language. Later on, there will also be a written series/guide which will be continuing on after you’ve mastered the basics.

Introduction

If you are new to learning Japanese, you may have noticed a curious element to the language itself. There are no spaces. Of course, if you are familiar with other languages such as Chinese or Burmese the lack of spaces between the words would be nothing new. However, for speakers of languages which do use spaces, such as English, French, German, Spanish, and countless other languages, this appears to be a daunting task. In order to understand why Japanese does not use spaces in writing, it is important to first go back in time and see the origin of the writing system itself.

Hiragana and Katakana can be considered to be the basic building blocks of the Japanese language. While Kanji  (Borrowed Chinese characters) does have a huge role in Japanese writing, all of the words that any Kanji character can represent can be shown using Hiragana or Katakana.