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About this site
This page is meant to help students of Japanese practice their writing skills. By following along with the motion of several animated GIF files, you can hone your writing skills, making your katakana, hiragana, and kanji more legible. As of now, it does not deal with transliteration, dipthongs, why the characters are organized the way they are, or any other writing conventions; it is only meant to help learn individual characters. The romanized equivalents of the sounds I've used are ones I believe to be most understandable to English speakers, because I've never felt a chill thinking about the beauty of sunrise over Mount Huzi.
When I first began learning Japanese, I found that among all of the other difficulties, writing posed special challenges. Not the least of these challenges was the fact that when writing Japanese characters, you must follow a specific order and direction of the strokes in order to be understood by a native reader of Japanese. Several times when trying to communicate through writing, I was met with blank looks of incomprehension, because what to me looked like the character for "water" looked to the average Japanese person like a scribbled mess.
Any book that deals with Japanese writing (two I have found immensely useful are Reading Japanese by Jorden and Chaplin, and Essential Kanji by P. G. O'Neill) will indicate stroke order, but I feel that a static representation doesn't really create much of an impression. Anything that I learned was quickly forgotten, and I was back to drawing kuchi as a circle.
With that in mind, I've constructed a series of animated GIF files that will lead you through how to write each character. Each image is like a brief cartoon on an endless loop. You will first see a large representation of the character on question, then watch as a brush draws the character on paper. Your job is to mimic the movement of the brush with pen or pencil on paper. Practice each character until you feel comfortable and natural drawing it. Just choose a subset below (katakana, hiragana, or kanji) and begin. Please note if your web browser does not support animated GIFs, this page won't be of much use to you. If the little origami crane here doesn't flap its wings, chances are good that this site and your browser just can't be friends.
About Japanese Writing
There are four basic character sets used in writing modern Japanese, katakana, hiragana, kanji, and romaji. If you're reading this page, I assume you've already got a pretty good grasp of romaji, because it's the Roman alphabet used in one way or another for most of the Western European languages. I think we can safely skip romaji.
Katakana
Katakana is a very angular script, and for me was the easiest to learn. Composed of 46 basic yet very distinctive characters, katakana can be used to express any sound in the Japanese language. The first 5 characters correspond to 5 vowels common to many languages.
The following forty characters are the equivalents of an English consonant followed by one of the above vowels, and the remaining character is a consonant by itself, equivalent to the English n.
- A sounds like the a in the English word father.
- I sounds like the i in the English word machine.
- U sounds like the u in the English word truth.
- E sounds like the e in the English word prey.
- O sounds like the o in the English word most.
Katakana is most commonly used to express
- Foreign names, like mine--Blake Sterzinger.
- Borrowed foreign words, like computer or beer.
- Company names, like Toyota or Yamaha.
- New words in Japanese, like pachinko or karaoke.
Hiragana
Hiragana is a much smoother script, full of loops and curves. I found hiragana more difficult to master than katakana because a) the characters are sometimes very close in appearance to one another, and more importantly b) the loops and curves are difficult to write correctly and smoothly without a confident hand. That is why I think a lot of guided repetition should be helpful in learning to write legibly in hiragana.
There are 46 basic hiragana characters, each one having a counterpart in katakana. As such, all sounds in the Japanese language can be expressed with just hiragana. These two basic writing systems share most rules, but lengthening vowel sounds and making consonant sounds harder are done differently in the two sets.
Hiragana is most commonly used to express
- Simple words, like the verb aru or the noun neko.
- Conjugations at the ends of verbs, like mimasu (I see) and mimashita (I saw.)
- Particles of speech, such as wa, e, and o. Note that the particle wa is the same as the hiragana ha, eis the same as the hiragana he, and the particle o is different from the normal hiragana o.
- Hiragana is the first writing system taught to Japanese children, so low-level children's books are written exclusively in hiragana, and even in more advanced level texts, difficult kanji will have the pronunciation written above in hiragana.
Kanji
Kanji is the most complicated script in Japanese. First brought to Japan by Buddhist monks more than 1200 years ago, these Chinese ideograms number in the thousands, each one representing a different idea, not necessarily a different sound as is the case with katakana, hiragana, and romaji. In fact, most of the characters have more than one possible reading. The ideogram for person can be read as jin, nin, hito, bito, ri, and several other sounds.
Kanji is most commonly used to express
- Place names, like Tokyo or Osaka.
- The names of people, like my wife.
- Most nouns, as well as verb and adjective stems.
- You should notice, though, that over the years the Japanese system has diverged from the Chinese, often simplifying characters, as in the Chinese and Japanese characters for country.
The kanji tutor is off and running like a mad turd of hertles, as my mother used to say. Right now, there are 45, which is a whopping 2.5% of the minimum needed for Japanese literacy. Bravely I struggle on...
Copyright © 1997 and 1998 Blake Edward Sterzinger. All rights reserved. Please direct all inquiries to blasterz@usa.net.
