#Common japanese for beginners full#

And there is a shorter form which is iku. So an advantage in Japanese is you don’t have to worry about all the different changes in verbs that happen in say French - ikimasu. It can be I go, you go, he go, they go - ikimasu. One, there’s a simple form and a not-so-simple form of every verb, that’s before we get into the issue of politeness, okay? So ikimasu is to go. In Japanese, very simply put, there are a few things you have to be aware of. You can read newspapers, magazines, books and so forth.

Don’t spend too much time on katakana, which is parallel to the hiragana, but do make an effort to learn the kanji, the Chinese characters, if you intend to stay with your Japanese in order to achieve a high level of proficiency because once you have the Chinese characters you can read. Now, a problem with Japanese is the writing system because you have to learn three of them: katakana, hiragana and the Chinese characters, the kanji. If you’ve got a sense of those things the rest of the language is going to fall into place. So if we start with verbs - and I like to approach languages in terms of verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, cause and purpose and maybe a few other things. You are going to encounter immediately the difficulty that a lot of words seem to sound the same because Japanese, in fact, has fewer sounds than English, but it’s one of these things that you jut get used to.

Japanese is not, obviously, a language related to English, so it’s going to take you longer to get used to the structure of Japanese than say a language like French. People get hung up about those things that are different in Japanese, so let me just give you an easy introduction to Japanese. In the case of Japanese they talk about pitch, which I’ve never understood.

#Common japanese for beginners full#

Many people have sort of an anxiety attack when they approach a new language, especially if they open a book and it’s full of detailed explanation about the pronunciation. I’m thinking of doing a series on different languages, which I would call Steve’s Easy Introduction To and this one is Steve’s Easy Introduction to Japanese.