What are the best resources to learn Japanese?
Japanese is an isolated language spoken by 121 million people in the Japanese archipelago. Small Japanese communities can be found in American Samoa, Hawaii, North and South America, Europe, and Australia. Japanese studies have revealed that it contains both Altaic and Austronesian elements: the phonological system is more similar to that of Austronesian languages (Alpatov 1998), but the archaic lexicon appears to have more Altaic elements (ibid.). This led to the hypothesis that Japanese (or, more precisely, the ancestor of Japanese) arose from the blending of two languages: Japan’s substratum language, which was possibly Austronesian, and the language of relatively recent newcomers, which was possibly Altaic (Shibatani 1992, Vance 2001). According to this theory, Japanese is an ancient creole language.
If you are just beginning your Japanese studies, you should know that there are four main types of Japanese characters: kanji, hiragana, katakana, and romaji. The use of Latin script to write the Japanese language is known as romaji. Kanji are Chinese characters that serve as the foundation for many words. Katakana is typically used to write foreign words, onomatopoeia, or to highlight something. Hiragana is used to change the grammar of a word or sentence, to form entire words and particles, and to allow younger or less experienced Japanese speakers to read kanji. Hiragana and katakana are both made up of phonetic characters, so each character represents a sound, called kana.
Why should you learn Hiragana?
Why focus on hiragana when there are four different types of characters in Japanese?
You already know how to read romaji if you’re reading this. Kanji is complicated, and memorising the many characters required for literacy takes years of practice. Katakana is rarely used because it is mostly used to represent foreign or borrowed words. That leaves only hiragana! Aside from this simple process of elimination, there are numerous reasons to learn hiragana. Hiragana characters appear more frequently than other types. In terms of frequency of use, it ranks right up there with kanji. Because hiragana can be used to modify kanji as well as serve as the grammatical structure that holds a sentence together, you will see hiragana all the time.
Even simple Japanese words and phrases use it, so learning hiragana from the start is a good idea. Hiragana is a phonetic language. This means that you can look at the characters and immediately know how they are pronounced. Hiragana is also a good place to start if you want to learn more about Japanese characters. You will eventually want to learn hiragana and katakana in addition to kanji. However, for beginners, learning hiragana is a less intimidating way to begin learning Japanese characters. It can even be used to clarify how to pronounce more complex kanji, making it an excellent tool for self-study in Japanese.
