It's essentially hiragana that is written above both Kanji and Katakana. What is Furigana?įurigana helps avoid the issue of having to know 1,000s of Kanji when reading. WaniKani is a great tool for helping build Kanji vocab, and this Teach Yourself book from Helen Gilhooly is a great way to get a better understanding of how Kanji works. This can make learning to read and write Japanese very daunting, but you'll get there with enough practice. For example, the Kanji for "tree" is "木" - it looks like a tree! They are used in writing and if a word has a Kanji version, the Kanji version will normally be used. Kanji are essentially pictograms of the things they are describing. If you are planning to go on holiday to Japan, learning Katakana will probably be more useful than Hiragana. So when walking past a karaoke bar in Shibuya, the sign will almost always be written as カラオケ and not からおけ. When travelling around Japan you'll actually see Katakana everywhere because it's also used for emphasis - like capital letters in English. For example, the word ケーキ is written in Katakana and pronounced kee-ki, and unsurprisingly, in English, means cake - yay, that makes things a little easier. Katakana (カタカナ) works in an almost identical way to Hiragana, except that it is used mostly for words that are imported into the Japanese vocabulary. If you are going to start studying Japanese, learning Hiragana is a must. In children's books and in beginner Japanese language books you'll often see Kanji with Hiragana written above it - this is called Furigana, and is used as a way to help readers pronounce the somewhat crazy world of Kanji. For example, the word for 'demon' is written as あくま and pronounced a-ku-ma. It is written phonetically, making Japanese pronunciation actually quite easy. Hiragana (ひらがな) is the syllabic script that you will become most familiar with when learning Japanese. If you have any feedback or questions, please contact me. I have built it with beginners in mind, and have made it easy to use on both mobile and desktop. This virtual keyboard is for Japanese language students so that they can quickly and easily type in hiragana and katakana when they don't have access to a Japanese IME (Input Method Editor).
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