こんばんは: Good Evening!

Well so far I am taking a Japanese 1 course at Santa Monica College. I am making this blog to help myself and maybe others who are doing the same in learning this language for the first time.

So far i have learned the two alphabets and approximately 20 かんじ which means kanji in roman letters. Kanji are all the official Chinese characters that have been borrowed into Japanese to shorten up the writting. This is in no way shortening the way to say things! Kanji is strictly to write with, you would read it the same way without!

So lets begin. The first alphabet is called ひらがな, which means hiragana. There are a total of 46 characters that are used in modern Japanese and I would input a table if i could but I don't think I will at the moment. Next post I will though for both alphabets. ひらがな is used for Japanese based words only! That means all words that originated in Japan are written with these characters.

This is where the second alphabet comes in handy, it is called かたかな or katakana. This alphabet has 45 characters only. This alphabet is used to form new words from different languages that didn't originate in Japanese: like the Wii or ウィイ. This comes in handy to say different words like computer and coffee.

Now these two alphabets are used to write out everything, yet the Japanese were smart! They decided to use Chinese characters to represent either one entire word or parts of words that are formed to make up words. For example, take weekend: it is derived from the words week and end. Now imagine that the word week could be written in one character instead of four characters, makes things simpler to read right? That is what kanji is used for.

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It is late, and I have Chemistry in the morning so I must leave this as a first post for the new blog. Now to say good night: (in romanized japanese or romajii) oyasuminasai/おやすみなさい (in hiragana).