Learn Japanese: Help

Japanese Basics

Writing Systems

I do not know Japanese. Nonetheless, I can provide a rundown of the basics of the writing systems used by Japanese, to contextualize the questions being asked. Japan primarily has three writing systems in use: Hiragana (ひらがな), Katakana (カタカナ), and Kanji (漢字). Hiragana is in essence the Japanese alphabet, consisting of 48 characters which are primarily consonant-vowel pairs. learning hiragana is cited frequently as the first step that any learner should take.

Katakana is another writing system that is used when transcribing foreign words into Japanese, for loan words (such as computer, which is written as コンピューター rather than こんぴゆーたー, romanji "Kompyuta"), and for stylistic purposes. It contains the same 48 characters as hiragana.

Kanji is a system where individual symbols correspond to words. For perspective, Japanese students are expected to know 2,000 kanji by the time they graduate highschool. Written text that is meant to be accessible, especially children's media, often include the hiragana representation of each kanji in small text. Note that all of the kana have kanji representations as well.

Romanji refers to the romanized form of a kana or kanji, which is written in the english alphabet.

Diacritics & Digraphs

There are two diacritic marks that are both used in hiragana and katakana. Both change the sound of the consonant in the kana. The double-tick marks change "k" to "g", "s" to "z", "t" to "d", and "h" to "b". The circle mark only changes "h" to "p". You can see what these marks look like in the tables at the bottom of the page.

Digrams consist of a kana which represents a consonant paired with the vowel "i" and one of the following kana: や (ya), ゆ (yu), or よ (yo), or their katakana counterparts. The second kana is generally written smaller. The rule, with the exception of "ja", "ju", and "jo", is to drop the "i" from the first kana and append the second kana. For example, きゃ ("ki" and "ya") becomes "kya".

Nuances

Note that "i" is a long vowel, and so "ki" is pronounced like "key". "e" is pronounced like "eh" and the kana ん (n) (katakana ン) may be pronounced like "n", "m", or "ng". For example, in the example of コンピューター above, the katakana "ン" is usually romanized as "n", but is pronounced as "m" in this case.

The kana ゐ (wi) and ゑ (we) have come to be pronounced the same as い (i) and え (e), and thus are very rarely used.

つ (katakana ツ) is romanized as "tsu" (not "su") and there is a smaller variant called a sokuon which is not pronounced but rather acts (typically) to extend the succeeding consonant sound. For example, きて (meaning "come") is romanized "kite". きって (meaning "stamp") is romanized kitte.

し (katakana シ) is romanized "shi" (not "si"). ち (katakana チ) is romanized "chi" (not "ti"). ふ (katakana フ) is romanized "fu" (not "hu").

The kana じ and ぢ are both romanized as "ji" (instead of "zi" and "di"). じ is far more common. The digraphs じゃ and ぢゃ do not become "zya" and "dya", nor do they become "jya", but are actually both romanized as "ja". The digraphs じゅ and ぢゅ both become "ju" and the digraphs じょ and ぢょ become "jo". This is all also true of their katakana variants. The ja/ju/jo kana that start with ぢ are shunted off to a special question set and won't normally be shown. Both forms of "ji" will be shown, however.

When わ (wa) is used as a particle, as its own word to mean "is", "as for", "speaking of" etc, it is written as は (ha) but is still pronounced "wa". The same is true when the particle is combined with other particles. Additionally, some words (mainly こんばんは ("konbanwa": good evening) and こんにちは ("konnichiwa": hello)) include "wa" written as は. I have read that this is because those words are shortenings of phrases where the は was used as a particle, and these exceptions are rare.

いてだきます ("itadakimasu": let's eat) is difficult to translate. It is a polite expression of gratitude and appreciation that one should typically say after receiving food in Japan before eating, from a host or at a restaurant for example.

おはよう ("ohayo": good morning), こんばんは ("konbanwa": good evening), おやすみ ("oyasumi": good night), and ありがとう ("arigatou": thank you) are relatively informal and shouldn't be used with strangers. They should have ございます ("gozaimasu") appended to them to make them more polite. So you'd say ありがとう ございます to a stranger who handed you something that you dropped.

This Learning Tool

The Learn Japanese page allows you to select groups of questions via the cascading list at the top of the page. These questions will be presented to you according to the settings you select.

When "Use Window" is checked, only five of the questions you selected will be available to you at the start. (Note that almost all of the checkboxes you may select include more than 5 questions) The question will rotate between these five until you begin to get good at them. When this occurs, new questions will be made available to you. Eventually, all selected questions will be available. This is good to use when you are learning for the first time, because it won't overwhelm you with many different questions at once.

When "Use Window" is unchecked, all questions become available immediately, which is good if you already know most of the questions and just want to refresh your memory and practice some more.

When "Shuffle" is checked, the questions will become available in random order. Otherwise, they will become available in a predefined order that is recommended for first-time learners. If shuffle is unchecked, it may cause unexpected behavior when multiple groups of questions have been selected. To clarify, if shuffle is unchecked and both the "Basic Hiragana" and "Basic Katakana" groups are selected, the page will not ask any katakana questions until it feels that you have mastered all the hiragana. Shuffle makes no difference if "Use Window" is unchecked, because all questions will become available immediately in that case.

When "Random" is selected, all available questions will have an equal probability of being the next question to appear, with the exception that a question will never appear twice in a row. When "Adaptive" is selected, questions that you frequently answer incorrectly have a higher chance of being the next question. Once again, a question will never appear twice in a row. When "Quiz" is selected, all of the questions will be shuffled and presented to the user in that order. "Use Window" and "Shuffle Questions" don't do anything when "Quiz" is selected. When all of the questions have been exhausted, the questions are re-shuffled.

Changes to the settings always take effect immediately.

Kana Tables

Hiragana

Katakana