background preloader

Learning Japanese

Facebook Twitter

The JET Programme--Official Homepage of The Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme-- The Japan Times - News on Japan, Business News, Opinion, Sports, Entertainment and More. How to Get a Job in Japan. This Monday I wrote a post entitled 5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Major in Japanese (and 2 You Might Consider It). This post is a follow up to that. A lot of people want to know about the best ways to get over to Japan and the best ways to find a job there. In this post, we’ll be hearing some advice from YouTubers who have had some firsthand experience with the matter. Hopefully they can offer some insight regarding what you’d be getting yourself into if you decide to live and work in Japan. How to Get a Job in Japan [yframe url=' This guy is all about motivation.

Japanese companies will really appreciate the fact that you are serious enough to live and/or visit there while looking for jobs. [yframe url=' This guy is always super genki in his videos. It’s also pretty much essential that you have some sort of college degree. [yframe url=' Getting a Non-Teaching Job in Japan Jobs for Students. The Ultimate Guide To Learning Hiragana.

Learning to read hiragana can seem like a daunting task, but we’ve made it easy for you, laying out the steps you need to take to go from being able to read zero hiragana to being able to read all of it. Follow the steps, do what they say, and you’ll be pooped out the other end a omnipotent hiragana being. Basically, you’ll be able to read the hiragana “alphabet” at a moderate pace (getting faster and better is up to you from there on out).

The speed at which I get you to this level of expertise, however, is very fast. In order to do that, we employ a few important methods: Mnemonics: Due to hiragana’s relative simplicity, image-based mnemonics are perfect! So shall we get started? あ、い、う、え、お A, I, U, E, O This is the first (and most important!) Shall we? あ is pronounced like the “a” in “car” or the “a” in “awful.” To remember this kana, find the capital “A” inside of it. い is pronounced like the “ee” in “eel.” To remember this kana, just think of a couple of eels (i) hanging out. P.S. GaijinPot. Japanese language learning games. Japanese games for language learning on Digital Dialects All Japanese games are free to use, do not require registration, and are suitable for kids and students of all ages.

Games for learning Japanese language in HTML5 (work on current browsers) include Japanese phrases, Japanese numbers, animals quiz, basic vocabulary quiz, days and months in Japanese and a colors quiz. We also make Japanese games for moblies and tablets. Good luck in your language learning endeavours! © 2018 Digital Dialects. Hiragana | Characters. Introduction and complete lists of all Hiragana letters. Printable Hiragana chart (PDF) is also available. Hiragana 【ひらがな】 Hiragana is one of three character sets used in the Japanese language. Each Hiragana letter represents particular syllable. Letter itself has no meaning. Hiragana is used widely to form a sentence. Origin Hiragana was developed in the 8-10th century by simplifying the form of particular Kanji symbols. Compared to Katakana, Hiragana letters have more curved lines. Number of Letters In modern Japanese, there are 46 basic Hiragana letters. In addition to these 46 basic letters called gojūon, there are modified forms to describe more sounds - 20 dakuon, 5 handakuon, 36 yōon, 1 sokuon and 6 additional letters.

FAQ: What are the letters with a bar on top (ā ū ē ō)? Gojūon 【五十音】 Gojūon-zu 【五十音図】 In Japanese, syllables are organized in the form of a table (5 x 10). To describe these sounds, Hiragana and Katakana alphabets are used. Letters い, う and え appear more than once in the table. Free Japanese Lessons - Hiragana - The Japanese Alphabet (Hiragana Chart) - Learn to speak the Japanese language online for free! Want audio on this lesson? Register for our Members Area and get audio for Hiragana - The Japanese Alphabet. It's FREE! The first step to learning the Japanese language is to learn the alphabet. Or, at least, to learn the sounds that exist in the language. There are absolutely no "tones" in Japanese like in many other asian languages and there are only 2 exceptions within the alphabet which will be explained later. The Japanese alphabet does not contain letters but, instead, contains characters and, technically, they are not alphabets but character sets.

There are 5 vowels in Japanese. Here is a Printable Hiragana Chart (PDF - get Adobe Acrobat Reader). Exceptions: 1. Click here if you'd like to know why these two exceptions exist. Note: You probably noticed in the chart above that there are 2 characters pronounced "zu" and 2 characters pronounced "ji". Some people wonder why "yi", "ye", "wi", "wu", and "we" are missing. For more help on the subject of Kana (Hiragana and Katakana)... Kana. Hiragana and katakana are the syllabic Japanese scripts, the so called kana. Each syllable is represented uniquely with one character or a combination of two characters (e.g. kyu, see the extended chart). In Kanji many glyphs can have the same pronunciation, while in the kana every character has different pronunciation. Unlike Kanji, the characters don't have any meaning.

Each basic set contains 46 characters. With each of the scripts, all sounds in the Japanese language can be expressed. Both of the kana are descendants of ancient Chinese writing. Hiragana Historically it was considered to be the writing of women. Today it is used to write: particles, like wa, de, o, mo verb conjugations, like "speak", "spoke" simple words like "to be","frog" instead of any Kanji that is not known to the person writing Every Japanese word can be written with hiragana, but using it instead of kanji is considered to be lack of education. The basic hiragana chart: Katakana The basic katakana chart: