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Learning Japanese

Konnichiwa!

While I might still be in sunny Ohio, I'm thinking about the steps I need to take to effectively learn the language that is Japanese. I hear it is difficult, or something.

10 things I have learnt so far:

• there are three systems of writing (hiragana, katakana, and kanji)
• Japanese pronunciation is pretty straighforward, like Spanish
• there are 46 hiragana characters and 46 equivalent katakana characters
• hirigana is used to write "particles" (grammatical artifacts) and some words
• katakana is used to represent loan words (from English and other languages)
• kanji are the building blocks of the written language -- complex characters that convey an idea/concept (they are used for most place names, nouns, adjectives, and verb stems)
• there are 1945 kanji in general usage (Joyo kanji), as specified by the Japanese government. you can't read modern Japanese without knowing 95% of these.
  
• there is no such thing as gender or number when it comes to nouns
• my name in katakana is デバシッシュ・バックシ, which is de-ba-shi-sshu・ba-kku-shi
• 1-10: ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, kyu, ju

Sayonara!


-- デバシッシュ・バックシ

The prolific Robert Zimmerman...

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