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      Katakana and hiragana characters—together called kana—are the two sets of 46 phonetic characters used in Japanese. An average, diligent student can learn to read the basic 46 hiragana and 46 katakana characters in a few hours, and with persistence can learn to write them in a few days. If you study for thirty minutes a day, in a few short weeks you will be a confident reader and writer of hiragana and katakana.

      How to Use This Book

      This introduction gives you basic information about the characters: where they came from, how to pronounce and write them, and even how to write your name.

      Both hiragana and katakana are essential to basic Japanese proficiency, but normally hiragana is learned first. In Section One you will learn the basic 46 hiragana characters, and how to write some simple words. Section Two introduces the usage rules that will allow you to write all of the sounds of Japanese and gives you more opportunities for practice. Section Three strengthens your hiragana skills through a wide range of exercises designed to both increase your knowledge of the Japanese language and reinforce your newly acquired writing skills. Then in Sections Four, Five and Six you will follow the very same process to master the katakana characters.

      At the end of the book you will find a list of suggested flash card activities. Since it is easier to learn to recognize hiragana and katakana than to write them, you may want to begin with the flash cards, printing them from the

      An Overview of the Japanese Writing System

      Japanese uses four types of scripts: hiragana, katakana, kanji and romaji.

      • Hiragana is a cursive set of 46 phonetic characters that express all of the sounds of Japanese. Hiragana is used mainly for writing the grammatical parts of sentences and native Japanese words for which there are no kanji.

      • Katakana is an angular set of 46 phonetic characters, generally used for writing foreign words and for showing emphasis.

      • Kanji are characters of ancient Chinese origin that represent ideas and sounds, and they are used for most nouns, verbs and other “content” words. There are 2,131 “common use” kanji that school children must learn by ninth grade.

      • Romaji are roman (Latin) letters used to write Japanese; you must already know romaji since you are reading this. Romaji is used in textbooks and dictionaries for foreigners learning Japanese (and for Japanese people learning western languages) but its use in day-to-day writing is somewhat limited to things like company names and acronyms.

      Don’t be too intimidated by the number and seeming complexity of Japanese characters. Japan’s 99 percent literacy rate should allay any fears that learning Japanese is impossible. Compared to kanji, kana characters are not complex; each one only has between one and four strokes. Each set of kana has 46 characters, compared to the English alphabet which has 52 letters (26 upper case and 26 lower case). Although kana characters have a few more overall strokes than the letters of the alphabet, kana have a consistent one-to-one relationship between character and sound. By contrast more than half of the English alphabet letters have multiple pronunciations, and seemingly endless exceptions. Anyone who has learned the complexities of English spelling can succeed at learning kana. So, although learning hiragana and katakana may at first seem to be a Sumo-sized task, with the right training and practice you can do it! Before you know it you’ll be a kana champion!

      Don’t rely on romaji. Foreigners learning Japanese sometimes rely on romaji, never learning to read and write. While it is possible to become quite proficient in speaking Japanese using only romaji, you will not be truly literate. Get comfortable using hiragana. When you buy a dictionary make sure it is written in hiragana, not romaji. When you write in Japanese use hiragana and katakana and kanji characters as you learn them.

      How to Pronounce Hiragana and Katakana

      Hiragana and katakana are pronounced the same way. The first five characters are the five Japanese vowels. Japanese vowels are short and clipped compared to English vowels. (All of the examples in this book use Standard American English pronunciation).

a	as in father
i	as in easy
u	as in you
e	as in red
o	as in oak

      The rest of the characters are consonant-vowel combinations, with the consonant always coming first (e.g., “ka,” “ki,” “ku,” “ke” and “ko”). The one exception is the single consonant syllable “n” that is pronounced by touching the back of the tongue to the roof of the mouth, as in “ink” and “sing.” Many Japanese consonants are commonly found in English and are easy to pronounce.

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k	as in coat	g	as in goat (voiced version of k)
s	as in Sue	z	as in zoo (voiced version of g)
t	as in tie	d	as in dye (voiced version of t)
n	as in no
h	as in house