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INTRODUCTION

Now, I know we just want to jump right into learning, but before we begin, we have to learn a couple basics. First of all, Japanese has three different alphabets: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Hiragana is the native Japanese language and is the one you will probably see most frequently. It will also be the first alphabet you will begin to learn. Katakana is an alphabet specifically for non-Japanese words. Katakana could be compared with Roomaji, or the writing of Japanese words into English. If your name is not Japanese, you would write it in this alphabet. The Roomaji of Katakana is usually written in capital letters, just to distinguish them.The third alphabet, and the hardest one, is Kanji, which is symbols adopted from the Chinese language. There are over 1,000 Kanji symbols but you only need to know approximately 600 to be able to read any Japanese material.
As we move on through the lessons, I will write the phrases and such in Roomaji. After you familiarize yourself with the different alphabets, you will able to start writing the sentences in Japanese. For now, though, we will use Roomaji.

Hiragana >>