Learn Japanese
This section contains some introductory pages to get you started on your path to mastering Japanese! Read through this page or use the quick-links to go direct to pages of interest.
Japanese characters
Japanese comprises of three scripts and a latin-script based variant called Romaji. Follow the quick links, or the the links below to get more details on each of the main three scripts.
Kanji is an ideogram script, where a character symbolizing the idea of a thing without indicating the sounds used to say it.
The syllable-based scripts, or Kanas are Hiragana and Katakana, where Romaji is the romanization of the kanas using Latin script.
An example of romaji is the work cat: The Japanese is ねこ, phonetically ね sounds like ne, and こ sounds like co or ko - the Romaji for this word is neko.
Our Hiragana and Katakana pages contains soundboards for pronunciation and animations to show how the kanas are written.
Tools on this site
This site has comprehensive search capabilites and the ability to collate lists of vocabulary or kanji.
We have public vocabulary and kanji lists for the JLPT, vocabulary lists for common loan-words and users have a ability to create their own lists.
The quiz function is a great tool to review the lists
More sections coming soon..
- Particals
- Counters
- Radicals
- Grammar basics