Japanese characters. The first thing you want to do when you want to learn Japanese weather you've started a course or wants to teach yourself Japanese, is to learn the Japanese alphabets.
The most used and necessary one is called hiragana. That is the alphabet that we learned first. These are characters like おにぎり. All characters in Japanese can be read and written with hiragana, so it is very important to know this one.
The second kind of alphabet is katakana, and it is mostly used for foreign words like コンビニ (conbini = convenience store) and デンマーク (Denmaaku = Denmark).
But unfortunately you can't only used hiragana and katakana, because sentences in Japanese would be a huge mess. So the third kind of alphabet is called kanji. It is definitely the most difficult one. Kanji originally comes from China, but the difference between Chinese and Japanese is that the same characters in the two languages has two different readings. And the reason, why the Japanese kanjis are so difficult, is because the different characters has several different readings.
Take for instance the character 食 - the meaning is "eat", and when it stands alone without other it's reading is しょく (shoku). But it can also be used in combination with hiragana like 食べる (taberu), which means "to eat". Fianlly it can be combined with other kanjis like 食堂 (shokudô), which means cafeteria.
Hiragana alphabet
Katakana alphabet (for foreign words)
Beside these characters, that you see above, there are also combinations of hiragana and katakana together like にゅ and ニュ (both read "nyu). It is the combination of "ni" and "yu".
You see? に + ゆ = にゅ.
Like this, there are many characters of combination.
Now, let me give you an example of how the three characters are used:
今日、おにぎりばとパスタを食べたいです。(Kyô, onigiri to pasta o tabetai desu.)
Today, I want to eat onigiri and pasta.
Here you can see three kinds of characters.
Hiragana characters like おにぎり, katakana characters like パスタ and kanjis like 今日. Can you tell the difference between the three types?
About learning to write and speak Japanese. According to me, THE best book, that we used in class at the university is CMJ or Course in Modern Japanese. It has conversations, grammar explanations and much more. You can buy it here at the Japanese amazon. After one semester at the university, we finished this book, and used vol. 2 for second semester. That means we had about one week for one chapter, and at the end of the week we had a test with grammar and kanji, which was very helpful even though it was extremely hard.
For practicing kanji, we used BKB or Basic Kanji Book, which can be bought here. This book is very helpful when it comes to learning kanji, because it has so many examples in it. We had one week for one chaper of kanji as well as with CMJ.
After the first semesters we started reading difficult Japanese texts like news paper articles and stuff, and we are currently doing the same thing to learn to translate from Japanese to Danish.
When you've learned the basics of Japanese, you need to keep practicing and become better. In order to do that, there are many different kinds of methods, you can use.
I often listen to Japanese radio to become better at recognizing Japanese words and practice kanjis in the program "Anki". When you have the chance, remember to speak Japanese in order to improve your language skills - that is very important, if you want to be a good speaker of Japanese.
There are so many ways to practice, so you just have to find the ways, that are best for you!
Japanese is difficult, but don't worry. If you work hard, you will be better! Even though you might not think you do. If what you do doesn't work, maybe you need to do something differently. Are you making it too easy of too hard for yourself?
Anyway, good luck with learning Japanese! 頑張ってね :)
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