English/Japanese: Lesson One

Welcome to lesson one of the English/Japanese beginner course. Lesson one will largely focus on the Japanese scripts.

All Japanese scripts have adopted a character format, rather than an alphabet. This means that, instead of multiple characters making up a word, a single character can be the word. However, other words can be made using two or more characters.

Kanji/漢字
Kanji, literally meaning "Han/Chinese Characters", is the most used script in Japan. Kanji takes at least fifty percent of its characters from Traditional Chinese.

Like most Japanese scripts, Kanji uses characters, meaning that a single character or "letter" makes up a word. For instance, the word "shoe" is made up of four Latin characters, but Kanji uses "靴" - only one character. The English word, "refrigerator" has twelve characters, while the Kanji variant, 冷蔵庫, has only three, which each mean something:

冷 = "Cold" 蔵 = "Warehouse" 庫 = "Storehouse"

However, as soon as two characters are put together, the meaning changes. If 冷 and 蔵 are put together, they make up "refrigerated", or, conversely, the joining of 蔵 and 庫, make up the word "storage".

Hiragana/ひらがな
The second most used script, Hiragana

みず - Water

き - Tree

じょせい - Woman (じょ = Female) (せい = Gender)

Katakana/かたかな
ウォーター - Water

トリー - Tree

ウーマン - Woman

Rōmaji
Mizu - Water

Ki - Tree

Josei - Woman