How do you memorize Japanese?
- Thread starter hyunkeru
- Start date
Coffeesan
先輩
- 6 Jul 2011
- 164
- 3
Yes just memorize the romaji e.g.
ア - a
イ - i
エ - e
ハ - ha
ゴ - go
Are you just beginning Japanese? And if so have you learned Hiragana yet? In my persona opinion its better to learn Hiragana first as its far more functional and allows you to start reading Japanese sentences, even if they have light Kanji within them. Essentially Katakana only has 1 reading really however a lot of Katakana also look identical to a number of full Kanji and as well as independent and non-independent radicals such as:
ハ
コ
エ
ム
ロ
You can tell the difference between a Katakana character masking as a Kanji or a Kanji itself fairly easilly from context even with the most basic reading skill, but I think there must be occasions when it confuses a reader because they simply dont know.
ア - a
イ - i
エ - e
ハ - ha
ゴ - go
Are you just beginning Japanese? And if so have you learned Hiragana yet? In my persona opinion its better to learn Hiragana first as its far more functional and allows you to start reading Japanese sentences, even if they have light Kanji within them. Essentially Katakana only has 1 reading really however a lot of Katakana also look identical to a number of full Kanji and as well as independent and non-independent radicals such as:
ハ
コ
エ
ム
ロ
You can tell the difference between a Katakana character masking as a Kanji or a Kanji itself fairly easilly from context even with the most basic reading skill, but I think there must be occasions when it confuses a reader because they simply dont know.
Glenn
一切皆苦
- 8 Jan 2004
- 7,842
- 200
I think generally the accented syllable in English is elongated. For example, in "chocolate" the "ate" part is accented, so you get チョコレート. If you know English pronunciation well and the 外来語's source language is English, you can probably guess pretty well how to spell words in katakana. Of course, there is still the matter of checking them to be sure.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure there are quite a few rules/guidelines about spelling English words in katakana in the Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar (or was it the intermediate version?) that also had to do with what sounds that exist in English but not in Japanese (like both "th"s) correlate to what sounds in Japanese. You may want to check that out if you can.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure there are quite a few rules/guidelines about spelling English words in katakana in the Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar (or was it the intermediate version?) that also had to do with what sounds that exist in English but not in Japanese (like both "th"s) correlate to what sounds in Japanese. You may want to check that out if you can.
