Posted on Wednesday, November 07, 2007 9:11 PM
Since Mana-sensei is visiting the US this week, there are no Japanese lessons.
Which gives me time to get cracking on Hiragana, but to say I'm confident and able to read a good portion of it already... Not really. ??!
For those of you not familiar with Hiragana; this is a 48-character "alphabet" (hardly an ABC, but it's the best way to describe it), which carries the 48 base sounds used in Japanese. Hiragana are curvy and are used to write native Japanese words.
There is a similar system called Katakana. This too has 48 characters, which represent the same sounds as Hiragana do. However, Katakana is used for non-Japanese (i.e. foreign) words.
Hard part in that is that the Japanese pronounciation of an English word, for instance, can differ severely from the way the English say it, and thus the characters are different as well.
Well, back to studying.
Cheers, K.