Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Remembering the Kana: A Guide to Reading and Writing the Japanese Syllabaries in 3 hours each [7] 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.
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
The difference in usage between hiragana and katakana is stylistic. 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 ...
The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived from components or fragments of more complex kanji. Katakana and hiragana are both kana systems. With one or two minor exceptions, each syllable (strictly mora) in the Japanese language is represented by one character or kana in each system.
For example, the word 構想 is written in hiragana as こうそう (kousou), pronounced kōsō. In a few words the character お (o) is used instead for morphological or historical reasons. The character ウ can take dakuten to form ヴ (vu), a sound foreign to the Japanese language and traditionally approximated by ブ (bu).