Step two

Tonight I take step two upon this journey. Barely out of my house, my feet have barely touched the earth along this path to knowledge, yet I have learned so much about myself, and truly focusing on a task at hand, and about dedication to a goal. This, however, has nothing to do with Japanese. So far as the language goes, I have learned quite little thus far, simply the knowledge contained in yesterday's segment. To review, there are 4 Japanese syllabaries, or alphabets. Romanji, a romanization of Japanese syllables, responsible for borrowed words in English such as Sushi, Sake, and the like; Hirigana, the first place my studies shall take me, it contains relatively simple flowing and curved characters and deals with things such as spelling out frustratingly complex kanji characters, verb and noun tenses, and honorifics; then there is Katakana, a sharp and angular alphabet used for words borrowed from other cultures, pan, borrowed from portugese and french, for bread, as well as onomatopoeia; and finally there is the myriad of characters in the Kanji alphabet, simply living in Japan will necessitate the knowledge of approximately two thousand characters, around the level a Japanese student will know by the beginning of high school, however academic studies above the high school level, and professional work often requires a knowledge pool of at least three thousand characters deep. Enough of the looking back, let us now return our gaze to the present!

Step two: The beginnings of my study of Hirigana.
Tonight I begin to learn the sounds of the different hirigana characters, as pronunciation is quite key, with slight differences changing the meaning of the word, and furthermore it is this one set of sounds used for the majority of the Japanese language. If you can sound it out, you can write it in Hirigana, even if you do not know the other two alphabets and most people will know what you mean, and may even be able to show you the correct kanji or katakana character(s) for the word!

Today I only learned 5 kana (characters, think of them like letters) in Hirigana. They correspond to simple vowel sounds, they are listed here in the Romanji form, with a couple examples of their sound bolded and underlined in words that follow:
a  - car, bar, you should get the picture here,
i   -  key, or the pronunciation of the English letter E
u  - Oooh, moo and so on
e  - eh (and not the canadian way of saying that), meh, eggplant, elephant
o  - oh, go, so, you know?

That is all for tonight, as I am quite tired, and memorization doesn't work if you force it for too long in one sitting. I will review those tomorrow, and begin associating them with their Hirigana kana instead of just their romanji.

That's all for tonight, and a short distance down the first leg of my journey. I've come a ways so far, but I might as well have made it to the edge of Boston while walking the whole way to Japan as far as actual progress towards completion of this goes.

G'night all,
~Dragon