Japanese can be a difficult language to learn. But it doesn’t have to be a painful process if certain steps are taken. I provide directions that break down this process into easily manageable chunks.

First, you want to get a good Japanese book. Don’t worry, I have a good one for you. It’s called: Genki 1: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese 1. It’s a well-rounded book that will give you a good foundation in Japanese. The text is light and casual - it’s not your typical dry, textbook.

Once you start getting into a few of the book’s lesson, you’ll want to start learning hiragana. Hiragana is the basic Japanese writing system and it’s essential that you master it early. One of the best ways to master it is to write the hiragana over and over again until it gets burned into your brain.

If you want some extra help to get you going, check out the book: Jimi’s Book of Japanese: A Motivating Method to Learn Japanese (Hiragana).

With your hiragana now mastered, going through the rest of the book should be a lot easier. Katakana is the next writing system you need to learn. It’s related to hiragana so mastering it should be relatively painless. Just like before, write them over and over again but they’re second nature.

At this point, you should try your hand at learning kanji. This is the third and most challenging writing system. It’s also the last writing system that you’ll need to learn. There are 1,945 kanji that you’ll need to learn. Don’t worry! If taken in stages, it’s not an impossible task.

A book that will get you started on your first thousand kanji goes by the name: Kanji Pict-o-Graphix: Over 1,000 Japanese Kanji and Kana Mnemonics. This books gives a good visual representation of the various kanji.

Another good book recommended by many is: Remembering the Kanji, Vol. 1: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters. It’s a tough system but many people swear by it. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, for a few bucks, you can get a kanji flashcard program called Kanji Flip. If you want to improve your vocabulary, I also recommend the sister application, Japanese Flip.

By now, you should know your hiragana, katakana, and 200 - 300 kanji. Now let’s take a fun detour. We’re now going to dive into the world of manga. This is the world of Japanese comic books. Due to the wide variety, you can find a manga on almost every imaginable subject. You can find manga on Ebay and Amazon Japan.

I recommend the manga Slam Dunk. It has a great story, memorable characters, and fantastic artwork. Basically, anything by Inoue Takehiko is going to be great.

As you’re reading your manga, this is now a great time to copy down vocabulary words and sentences that you find interesting/useful. Put them on flash cards and go over them on a regular basis. You can also use an online flashcard program like Anki to further streamline the learning process. A simple Google search will get you to the right page.

From here on out, you can do some freelancing. You can stick to a textbook if that’s what you like, but I want you to go out and watch Japanese movies, tv shows, read magazines, and start having simple conversations with native Japanese speakers. If you feel uncomfortable with this, it’s OK to wait. But when you start coming out of your shell, you’ll be amazed at how much Japanese you know.

Exposing yourself to outside Japanese stimuli will further accelerate your rate of progress. Not to mention that it’s also a lot of fun. You’ve put in the hard work in the beginning, slowly building your foundation. Now you can learn at a more casual pace if you want. It all comes to a point where your knowledge of Japanese gets to a threshold where exposing yourself to Japanese media is much less confusing. By now you should be more than halfway done with your kanji and you should have a good fundamental understanding of Japanese. Keep using this method and soon, reading and understanding Japanese novels will be within your grasp.

In closing, it’s important to have a plan in life. Not only a plan but a goal. With a goal, all you have to do is go backwards through your plan and you’ll soon know the intermediate steps needed to accomplish your goal. And finally persistence goes hand in hand with accomplishing your goal. Regularly expose yourself to Japanese and you’ll be amazed with the end results. I wish you the best of luck!

By Jason Nakamura

Good article, wasn’t it? I knew you’d like it.  Check out the info here if you want to know EVEN more about Hiragana translation.

You may lose your courage at first when learning to speak Japanese as a new language. An appropriate understanding of the fundamental of Japanese language is a must if you are a beginner. The simplest direction to take is to start out from the very basic parts first such as ‘common greeting phrases’ that can use to communicate with Japanese in real life, ‘numbers’, and ‘hiragana chart’ then slowly move on to the next step.

The ‘how-to learning approach of Japanese language’ is the main part of this article. But I will not be teaching you the language from this article, if you are looking to learn Japanese lessons you can check out the link at the bottom for more information on “Japanese lesson online”.

The purpose of this article is going to show you the learning approach of Japanese language instead. Flash back to your childhood, try to recap the memory when you learn to speak English for the first time, how did you learn the language you are speaking right now?

The best way to learn is to watch the way how Japanese people talk and gestures including their actions they took while they are having a conversation it does generally associate gestures with what people are saying. I think it is a great way to put together with words and visuals if you want to learn how to speak Japanese efficiently.

I think it is better if you can try to put words with gestures and facial expressions together to actually learning the language culture. This is a crucial part of doing so but this alone is not important enough to learn the Japanese language.

You need to actually learn this at the same time when learning how to speak in a Japanese way. So I would like to suggest you to watch some Japanese movies with English subtitles as well as getting an Online Japanese Courses to guide you in your learning how to speak the language correctly. I do wish this article can aid you in your learning process.

By Alex Hayashi

Great stuff, yes? I thought you would find it really interesting.

Check out the info here if you’re STILL dying for more info about the Hiragana chart.

When looking to learn Japanese, why should one use a learn Japanese software package? With so many thousands of people learning Japanese in this way every day in the world today, surely the benefits must be very effective. What are some of the benefits of using learn Japanese software?

First and foremost is the obvious; to be able to learn a language in the comfort of one’s own home is more than convenient. Too many of us today have daily schedules that are way too busy to set aside any time for taking conventional classes. What we need, is a means of learning our second language to be ready and waiting for us whenever we have the time for it, around the clock, so that we may take on our learning without rearranging our day.

But while that may be first to come to mind, it is not the most important. The course is the thing. When you use learn Japanese software, you have a vast supply of multimedia resources at the click of a mouse; video explanations of cultural points and of writing Kanji (Japanese ideographic script), audio files to use to develop your intonation and pronunciation, and tests and quizzes to use to compete with the learn Japanese software in order to raise your scoring higher and higher. There are also vocabulary lists a mile long and learning games to use to memorize them all in a fun setting, as well as printable grammar sheets and conjugation charts, and much, much more.

One good feature of learn Japanese software is the online forums you can use 24 hours a day, and 7 days a week, to speak Japanese with your peers, and even get the support you need from many, even hundreds, who are eager to help you. It is really a very full, and fulfilling experience to learn Japanese using learn Japanese software.

By Lewis Waller

The Japanese language is so fascinating. The tonal qualities of the language is quite unique and the inherent politeness of the Japanese people is translated well into its language which is in turns elegant and stylish and drips with respect.

Japanese writing is also a very elegant script and it has evolved from its original Chinese script beginnings to become something that is intrinsically Japanese. There are actually different types or ways of writing Japanese characters and it has been a source of confusion for people who are not familiar with Japanese culture or for students of Japanese culture who have not yet fully researched the intricacies of the Japanese written language.

The three ways of writing Japanese characters are Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana, with another version called Romaji being used for special purposed.

Kanji

The word kanji is a Japanese derivative of the Chinese word hanzi, which translates to “Han characters”. The word Han pertains to the Han Dynasty and is also the name that the Chinese use to refer to themselves.

Using Kanji would mean employing between 5000 to 10000 Chinese characters. This meant that writing in this form was very difficult. In 1981, the Japanese government, as a measure to simplify how Japanese is written and read, intrduced the j?y? kanji hy? or List of Chinese Characters for General Use. The list includes 1945 regular characters and 166 special characters that has a use only for writing people’s names. All official documents, as well as newspapers, textbooks as well as other publications only use this form.

Hiragana

Chinese characters are considered as the source for Hiragana syllables. Hiragana – which means “ordinary syllabic script” — was referred to originally as onnade or “women’s hand” because women used this form the most. Men are known to write in Kanji and Katakana. But usage of Hiragana evolved through the centuries, and by the 10th century, it was being used by both men and women.

The earliest versions of hiragana had diverse characters that represent the same syllable. The whole system was simplified however in order to make it easier to use by establishing a one to one correspondence between the written and spoken syllables.

Katakana

The Katakana “alphabets” have a very storied history. It was taken from abbreviated Chinese characters that were used by Buddhist monks. They used Katakana in order to illustrate the correct pronunciations of Chinese text back in the 9th century. Initially, there were so many different symbols used just to represent one syllable that it became quite confusing. But through time, it became more streamlined. Katakana was initially thought of as “men’s writing” but over the centuries it has been used to write onomatopoeic words, foreign names, telegrams, and non-Chinese loan words. Katakana contains about 48 syllables.

There is also another script used in the Japanese language called Romaji. It is basically used to write the Latin alphabet into Japanese characters, especially for English or Latin alphabet-spelled words that do not have a direct Japanese translation.

By Philip Nicosia

Wasn’t it an interesting read? I hope you enjoyed that article.

Click on the link at the end of this sentence if you are dying to know more about how to write Japanese texts.