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Remembering the Kana: A Guide to Reading and Writing the Japanese Syllabaries in 3 hours each [8] is a book by James Heisig for remembering hiragana and katakana. It uses mostly the same imaginative memory technique as Remembering the Kanji I, though some katakana are prompted to be learned as simplified forms of their hiragana counterparts.
The books are aimed at a broader audience in North America and at a grade school audience in the rest of the world. In 2003, Takahashi & Black/PBJ Omnimedia (imprint) won a Parents' Choice Award for category "Doing and Learning." [1] and an IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Award) in the category for Academic books. [2]
Reading and Writing sections are focused on introducing Kanji. Learners are presented with a grid of Kanji accompanied by on'yomi and kun'yomi pronunciations, writing steps, and a selection of words that incorporate each character. The rest of the lesson contains practice questions centered around a reading using new Kanji characters.
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana.Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis.
It is a phonetic lettering system. The word hiragana means "common" or "plain" kana (originally also "easy", as contrasted with kanji). [1] [2] [3] Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems. With few exceptions, each mora in the Japanese language is represented by one character (or one digraph) in each system.
Usually, hiragana is the default syllabary, and katakana is used in certain special cases. Hiragana is used to write native Japanese words with no kanji representation (or whose kanji is thought obscure or difficult), as well as grammatical elements such as particles and inflections ( okurigana ).
Specifically, hiragana developed from cursive forms of the man'yōgana script, called sōgana (草仮名). In Japan, the sōgana cursive script was considered to be suitable for women's writing, and thus came to be referred to as women’s script (女手, onnade). Onnade was later applied to hiragana as well.
Japanese-English dictionary with hiragana, katakana and kanji on-screen keyboards; Japanese Resources: Dictionaries, Paul D. Black; Kanji Clinic book reviews, Japan Times column; Online Japanese Dictionaries and Glossaries, Jim Breen; Online Japanese Dictionary with comprehensive searching, audio and kanji stroke animation