Learn the Japanese writing system.

Hi everyone, welcome back.

In this lesson, Naomi Sensei and I are going to explain a little bit more about one of the most unique aspects of Japanese, the writing system.

That's right. There are a little things that we are going to cover in the lesson.

Definitely. The Japanese writing system has actually been called the world's most complex.

But that's where we come in.

We're here to make the trip through it easy and fun.

Let's start with the basics.

Japanese has two native alphabets.

The technical term for this is syllabic scripts.

Syllabic scripts.

We'll refer to them as alphabets. Okay. So the two native Japanese alphabets are, hiragana and katakana. They each have their own purpose and usage. These scripts or

alphabets are referred to collectively as kana.

First, before we go on, let's explain what syllabic means.

Japanese doesn't use letters. It uses syllables.

These syllables are usually made up of one consonant and one vowel, but some of them contain

only one vowel. Now, Japanese has a lot fewer sounds than English.

There are only five vowels and only 14 basic consonants.

So these syllables are all different combinations of these five vowels and 14 basic consonants.

All together, there are 46 syllables.

If you can make all 46 of these sounds, you can speak Japanese.

Yeah, you can say that.

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