Gettin' Schooled

So we have both been taking Japanese lessons twice a week for about nine months now, six months of which were in the States. In the States we learned to speak Japanese using the English (aka Roman, aka Romaji) alphabet, which is basically cheating only good for pronunciation.

Real Japanese has three alphabets.  To illustrate, I swiped a handy chart off of a popular encyclopedia site (which incidentally gives a pretty good, super-basic summary of Japanese).  The first three columns are the three Japanese alphabets, the fourth is the English alphabet version. 


When we began our lessons here we were unceremoniously switched to reading the real deal.  Good news is, we both now know the two easier, phonetic alphabets (Hiragana and Katakana). While real written Japanese incorporates all three of the alphabets together, we have found that just our Hiragana and Katakana knowledge really comes in handy.  For example, we have used it to tell shampoo from conditioner and chocolate ice cream from vanilla.  It really helps that a lot of Japanese words (particularly the more modern or "imported" words) are surprisingly similar to the English word.  Notice "tabako" in the chart above.  Can you guess what "shanpuu", "kondishona", "chokoreto" and "banira" are? ;)

from our textbook....believe it or not, we can whip
through that chickenscratch pretty quickly