Introduction
The Japanese writing system consists of three different character sets: kanji (several thousands of Chinese characters), and hiragana, and katakana (two syllabaries of 46 characters each; together called kana). Japanese texts can be written in two ways: In Western style, i.e. in horizontal rows from the top to the bottom of the page, or in traditional Japanese style, i.e. in vertical columns from the right to the left side of the page. Both writing styles exist side by side today.
In comparison with other languages, Japanese knows relatively few sounds, and pronunciation poses few problems to most learners. The biggest difficulty is accented, which does exist, but to a much lower extent than in the Chinese language. In addition, there are relatively many homonyms, i.e. words that are pronounced the same way but have different meanings. In this blog, we’ll discuss how one can learn Japanese using various offline and online sources in India: