Loading ...Building Foundations - Hiragana and Katakana
Japanese is made up of 3 components of the writing system namely, hiragana, katakana and kanji. So the first thing you need to memorize is the hiragana.
Hiragana consists of 46 main characters that needs to be memorize. There are 2 particular characters that is not required to be memorize because it is not used anymore today in the Japanese society. Its the ゑ(we, pronounce as ‘e’), and ゐ（wi, pronounce as ‘i’). Hiragana is used very often in grammars, particles and vocabulary. Memorizing the hiragana first is the biggest stepping stone to learning Japanese.
After you have finished memorizing hiragana, you might want to start practicing on the katakana chart next. Its takes some time to finish memorizing both hiragana and katakana completely. But you might want to leave out katakana first and jump straight to learning vocabularly.
Katakana is used mainly for foreign words or difficult Japanese kanjis. For example, wine, bread and yogurt. These products are not originally from Japan. So the Japanese uses katakana to replace words that cannot be found in their vocabulary.
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[...] you are a total newbie on learning hiragana and katakana, start creating your own set of hiraganas first. Probably the first 10 sounds namely, [...]