Most foreigners can master hiragana, katakana and romaji quite easily, but have difficulties in kanji, probably due to their complexities.Įspecially foreigners from the western countries, where their mother tongues are based on Latin characters and have no background in Chinese characters. Examples of Romajiĭid you see the roman letters I used besides the examples of hiragana, katakana and kanji? Those are actually the romaji.Īll these 4 sets of characters formed the basis of the Japanese characters. Therefore if you know romaji, it will definitely help when keying characters in those devices. For example when singing a Japanese song in the Karaoke, you can sing with the romaji lyrics if you can't read the other characters.īesides, when I am using the Japanese electronic dictionary or typing Japanese words in computer, I use romaji to input the Japanese characters. However, for foreigners who don't know Japanese, romaji can help to give correct pronunciation. Most of the time Japanese articles are written in a combination of hiragana, katakana and kanji, it would seem like it is useless to learn romaji. However, she stopped using them when we got familiarized with the hiragana. My Japanese teacher used them to help us to pronounce the Japanese words correctly in the first few lessons. Romaji are roman letters, normally used to help foreign Japanese learners in the pronunciation. 日本語 (ni hon go) which means "Japanese language".Japanese have also created their own kanji characters. Kanji characters are basically Chinese characters, and some of them were slightly modified. レストラン (re su to ran) which means "Restaurant".アメリカ (a me ri ka) which means "America".Check out the katakana chart for all the katakana characters. However nowadays young people in Japanese like to use katakana more often for normal word expression. Japanese katakana are mainly used for expressing loanwords (words "loaned" from foreign languages) and foreign names. Check out the hiragana chart for all the hiragana characters. It is like the 'abc' in the English alphabet, which helps us in Japanese pronunciation. When I first started on my Japanese lessons, Japanese hiragana was the first Japanese character set taught by my teacher.
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