Quote:
Originally Posted by KyokoUK
Oh dear...my family has been settled in the UK for so long that I grew up never even hearing Japanese spoken. Now I have tried to start learning and found "NHK World" which has lessons on it and they seem really nice but after reading through this thread it makes me think that I know absolutely nothing about what I am doing and I don't even know if the site I was using is any good. Kanji is so small that with my eye problems I can't even focus on it and having seen it up close, just thinking of trying to learn something like that terrifies me. Actually all I wanted to do was be able to speak politely to people when I finally am able to visit my homeland and being able to watch anime without needing subtitles, again due to my poor eyesight. Now, after reading through this, I'm not sure what I'm doing. I don't even know what hiragana and katakana are and I feel like an idiot now, I feel like like a fish that can't swim. Maybe I should just forget it all and accept that I'm just another rather thick English girl who resembles a Japanese person.
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Sorry for the double-post!
Hey, KyokoUK. Hirigana and Katakana are the Japanese "alphabets". There are
46 basic syllables in each, made of at least one vowel, With the exception of ん, or "n". So, in words like nihonjin, or Japanese (person), the last "n" is it's own syllable.
Learning the kana is almost, if not, essential to learning Japanese. Here's a kana chart for you:
http://www.saiga-jp.com/img/characte...akana_list.gif