Learning Japanese using Hiragana

2007-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

So watching Heroes has made me want to learn Japanese again. I’ve noticed that one difficult thing is using hiragana-only to learn Japanese. Here’s the same sentence that means The book is good:

hon wa ii desu.
ほんはいいです。
本はいいです。

The problem for me isn’t the script, it’s the spaces. It’s very easy for me to read the first one and know that there’s different words.

The second example is in hiragana only. There’s no way of knowing (unless you know the language) what the different characters represent. It’s all one space-less sentence.

The third example is actually quite easy to read in comparison to the second. The kanji for book is easily recognized.

I’ve been doing the Rosetta Stone Japanese lessons and I go through the lessons three times. Once to just figure out what words are what and what is a part of speech, so Romanji (the first one) is best. Then I go through it to torture myself using hiragana. Then I use the kanji which are just symbols that represent things, thus making it easy to say, “oh yeah, that’s a book, that’s a tree, that’s an elephant” and immediately answer questions.

Dave Dash

Learning Japanese using Hiragana