Anime Overdose

I’ve been watching a number of anime series this past few days. And I say this has deprived me A LOT of sleeping hours. I feel like a zombie every time I go to office for work. I know I need about 8 hours of sleep a day but I can’t help watching a “few” episodes each night. I don’t know how long this streak will last. What I do know is I really love watching anime more than going to sleep—which is bad for my health.

Here’s a list of the anime series I’ve watched within the last 2 weeks:

• To Aru Majutso no Index (24 episodes)
• Special A (24 episodes)
• Toradora (25 episodes)
• Lovely Complex (24 episodes)

This is quite a lot compared to more my usual dose of anime. Maybe this is because I’ve been out of social activities these days.

• No Badminton
• No Jogging
• No  Shopping
• No Traveling

Next, I’ll be Learning the Katakana

I guess I’m pretty much confident on learning another Japanese writing now that I have learned hiragana. This time, I’ll be moving on learning katakana!

But wait!. . .

I have to confess, now that I have triumphed over learning hiragana, which, some time ago, I thought was something impossible for me to do, I am a bit out of motivation. I don’t feel so interested learning katakana now that I know hiragana. I hope I get to overcome this feeling soon.

I can read and write hiragana!

Hiragana Chart

I am proud to say that I can read and write hiragana!!!

After 3 weeks, though I did not practice everyday because I have work, I was able to memorize hiragana. I used the Genki Online: Self Study Room website for my reference. This website was recommended by my Japanese friend.

What I liked about learning hiragana using this website was that visual representation (visual clips), pronunciation and stroke order where provided for every hiragana characters. This way, the characters were easy to remember.

Japanese Writing

In writing Japanese, you will be dealing with 3 types of scripts: hiragana, katakana and kanji.

KANJI (漢字)

Kanji is the most ancient of the three Japanese writing systems. Kanji are Chinese characters adopted by the Japanese. The Japanese term kanji literally means “Han characters” or “Chinese characters”. Among the three main scripts, kanji is the most complicated. A single kanji may have one or more meaning depending on context, intended meaning, use in compounds, and even location in the sentence.

Kanji are used for writing nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs. But unlike the Chinese language, Japanese cannot be written entirely in kanji. For grammatical endings and words without corresponding kanji, two additional, syllable based scripts are being used, hiragana and katakana, each consisting of 46 syllables.

HIRAGANA (ひらがな)

Hiragana is more rounded script and used to write the grammatical parts of words and sentence especially when Kanji is not appropriate for writing.

Unlike Kanji, Hiragana was developed by Japanese people, and today, all the Japanese Children learn Hiragana to write first and then step up to Kanji characters as they grow.

Hiragana is basically phonetic alphabet which means a Hiragana symbol is created by the sound of characters. There are 46 basic Hiragana symbols.

KATAKANA (カタカナ)

Katakana symbols are more sharp and angular than Hiragana symbols. Katakana is often used for representing non-Japanese words or foreign words.

Katakana symbols are also said ‘partial character’ which means the character is a part of Kanji character.

Like Hiragana scripts, Katakana scripts are the same set of sounds and called phonetic alphabetic which has got 46 basic Katakana symbols.

I am Learning Hiragana

a i u e o

Last week, I was having a conversation with a Japanese friend. He can speak English so we were talking in English the whole time. He suggested that I study Japanese writing, starting from hiragana, then katakana and finally kanji so that he may easily teach me words in Japanese. He says that it is sometimes hard to spell out Japanese words using the alphabet (romaji).

If I learned Japanese writing then, I may be able to read Japanese characters then it will be easier for me to learn the language.

So, I followed his advise starting with the much easier hiragana.