Day One: Hiragana

If you aren’t big into charts, we recommend making your own flashcards and saying them out loud. There are also a bunch of free apps out there and heaps of classes on Youtube. Regardless of your methodology, this is the first step in being able to ‘Japanese’. (We are in the process of developing physical and digital flashcards for the site, so check out our store every so often and we should have them available by late July or early August.) 

The reason we have you do this first, is so you can understand the structure and take time to get used to the sounds the language makes. Japanese is really cool because it rarely, if ever, varies from the sounds standardized in each character listed. As long as you can pronounce and memorize those sounds you can pronounce Japanese. This goes against the popular belief that Japanese is a tonal language. It is not. Japanese has something called pitch accents, but we’ll save that for another lesson. For all intents and purposes, Japanese is pronounced simply with the sounds on that chart.

Once you have that script down you are read to move onto the next step… Katakana.