A little bit of Japanese theory

Writing in Japanese is very difficult. I will try not to scare you and in a simple way, show you how
to write in Japanese.

Generally, all the useful information about the Japanese writing, has been placed in “Japanese
writing” section at the beginning of this page.

Just a reminder:

Japanese language consists of two syllable alphabets:

1. Hiragana – is used for phonetic transcript. If you’ll learn hiragana, basically, you will be able to
write anything in Japanese. But, a little bit like a first grader – without using these fantastic
Kanji characters 

あ　い　う　え　お　か　き　く　け　こ
 

2. Katakana – is used for proper names transcript (mostly of foreign origin, because Japanese
have Kanji, which replaces its proper names), names, and onomatopoeic words.

ア　イ　ウ　エ　オ　カ　キ　ク　ケ　コ
 

Besides these two alphabets, there is Kanji. It has its origin in China. 　In the beginners’ course,
we will learn only couple of these characters.

本　日　曜　六　食　内　仲
 

We have to mention Rōmaji – this is a Latin alphabet transcript.

In this course, we will use Hiragana and Katakana. To make things easier, first three lessons will
consists of Rōmaji transcript.
In addition, in Japanese language words aren’t divided by space character – they all represent
one word sequence. To make things easier, we will separate words.

You can encounter a transcript from top to bottom. This text can be read out from right to left.
In our texts, we’ll be using the standard way, the horizontal transcript. Reading like this is
easier, so from left to right.