First and Foremost - Alphabet

The first things to learn of any language is the alphabet. I will give you the alphabet and then we can go from there on pronunciation. They have a total of 46 Hiragana and Katakana not including compound letters. Those will be explained next post. So here are the Hiragana!

	A	I	U	E	O
A	あ	い	う	え	お
K	か	き	く	け	こ
S	さ	し*	す	せ	そ
T	た	ち*	つ*	て	と
N	な	に	ぬ	ね	の
H	は	ひ	ふ*	へ	ほ
M	ま	み	む	め	も
Y	や		ゆ		よ
R	ら	り	る	れ	ろ
W	わ				を
N	ん*

So, as you can see, they have the vowels a, i, u, e, o.

• A is pronounced ah as in garden. It is a soft sounding a.
• I is pronounced ee as in feet. It is a long sounding i.
• U is pronounced oo as in spoon. It is a soft sounding u.
• E is pronounced eh as in wet. It is a soft sounding e.
• O is pronounced oh as in Oregon. It is a long sounding o.

They are very simple and are fairly straight forward. Now not only do they have vowel but they have, and I hate to call them this since they are different than ours, consonants. The reason I am hesitant is they don't function like ours in that you can't put together the t's and h's. There are some compound ones but those are very specific on which ones and that will be discussed in my next post.

The ones are as follows: k, s, t, n, h, m, y, r, w. They are combined with the consonants as so: ka, sa, ta, na, ha, ma, ya, ra, wa. The same goes for each of the consonants and vowels.

• K is pronounced like the k in kite.
• S is pronounced like the s in soup.
• T is pronounced like the t in tight.
• N is pronounced like the n in no.
• H is pronounced like the h in hose.
• M is pronounced like the m in mom.
• Y is pronounced like the y in yard.
• R will be discussed later since it deserves more than one little sentence. Mostly because of the difficulty a lot of people have.
• W is pronounced like the w in water.

The ones with the * mean that they have different sounds than normal. Here are the pronounciations.

The first one is し. It is spelled shi (sounds like she).
The second one is ち. It is spelled chi (sounds like chee).
The third one is つ. It is spelled tsu (sounds like tzoo).
The fourth one is ふ. It is spelled fu (sounds like who and on occasion foo, depends on the word).
The fifth one is ん. It is spelled n (sounds like uhn).

This will be gone over later but as a first entry, I believe it is easiest to start with the most basics. Next post will be about the compound letters. That will be posted Sunday March 25th 2012.