日本語 Japanese / 英語 English Language Site

Human Japanese is an application for Android, and I've been using it on my G1 mobile phone for a few weeks now. It's in the format of a book, and features a selection of games and learning aids.

I'd just been looking for some Japanese tutorial PDFs, and there are some really good ones. Like the Japanese Cheat Sheet and Tofugu's Japanese Particles cheat sheet and the PDF version of Tae Kim's Japanese Guide to Japanese Grammar.

I've included a picture I've drawn to illustrate some of the basic Kanji and how they are representations of something that's easy to remember.  

Included in the picture are:

What is Romaji?

Romaji is a convenient written form of spoken Japanese.  It uses the Roman alphabet (A-Z) to phonetically identify sounds made in Japanese.  If you just want to know a few phrases, and have a quick reference to the language for a short visit then it's ideal.  In which case, you don't need to read the rest of this!  If, however, you are serious about learning Japanese to a reasonable conversational level then do yourself a favour, and stop using Romaji as soon as possible!

Bad habits are encouraged

This first entry is about は (as a particle it's pronounced "wa" although in words it's "ha")

Here is a list of common Japanese adjectives, and the Romaji, hiragana and kanji versions for your reference.  Those listed are in their plain form. For the polite version, use desu (です) at the end.

This is a short note on how to type in hiragana, katakana and kanji on your Android phone.  I only have a G1 Android, so I can only verify that it works with up to Android 1.6.

There are a few katakana and hiragana that are quite similar, and are easily mistaken for one another.  In this page I  look at the ones that have given me problems, and the ways I have found that helped me best in distinguishing them.

The katakana ン (n) and ソ (so)

These kana are so similar, they are often confused, but believe me when I say after a while you will be able to distinguish them without thinking about it.  The encouraging thing is that these are, in my opinion, the hardest of the similar kana to distinguish.

Here is my first list of Kanji taken from JLPT level 4.  There will be a series of these, and I'll go through all of the most common Kanji.  At some stage I'll probably add some examples of their usage too - although the use of numbers is relatively straightforward.

一 Ichi; Itsu Hitotsu

One - just one line, and not unlike the Roman Numeral 1 turned on its side!

There are quite a few tutorials on getting hiragana characters on Ubuntu, but many of them seem  rather complicated, and very few seem to mention Karmic at the time of writing (even though it's been stable for a good few months now).  I won't guarantee that this will work for everyone with Ubuntu Karmic, so please back-up important data before attempting this.  Oh, and if you don't know what Karmic Koala is then you're best leaving this tutorial alone!