Tips on How to Learn Japanese — Why You Need Furigana
Backed by the world’s third largest economy and a unique culture of manga, sumo, and workaholism, Japanese is a very interesting language to learn.
Many say that spoken Japanese sounds very soft and smooth, since it only has five single vowels (a, e, i, o, u).
Written Japanese, however, appears to be more complicated. To begin with, the modern Japanese script mainly has three components: Kanji (漢字, Chinese characters), Hiragana (ひらがな), and Katakana (カタカナ). In addition, Romaji or Latin letters are also occasionally used.
For instance, you can tell that there are two types of characters in this sentence: 日本語を勉強しています。 The square-shaped characters (日, 本, 語, 勉, 強 in this case) are Kanji or Chinese characters, they mostly denote meaning and form a large part of the Japanese vocabulary; whereas the curly characters above (を, し, て, い, ま, す) are Hiragana. Hiragana mostly denote grammar but also form a portion of the vocabulary. These two things are mostly what you need as a beginner.
Hiragana are phonetic and are easy to learn whereas Kanji being Kanji will take more time. Hiragana can also be used to mark the pronunciation of Kanji or even Katakana; when used in this way they are referred to as Furigana (振り仮名). As mentioned above, there is another category of phonetic symbols in Japanese, called Katakana, which are used for transliterating foreign words, e.g. コミュニケ―ション (communication).
While the sounds in modern spoken Japanese are easy to make and somewhat pleasant to hear, there are mainly two challenges regarding Japanese pronunciation:
- You don’t get enough exposure to Katakana. You can learn those symbols within an hour, but since you don’t see them often in Japanese texts, you’ll quickly forget some of them.
- For every Kanji, there are at least two different pronunciations. On’yomi (音読み, Sino-Japanese reading) literally means ‘sound-based reading’. This is the pronunciation that is closer to the original Chinese pronunciation when these characters were imported from China. Kun’yomi (訓読み, native reading), on the other hand, is the pronunciation of a native Japanese word that closely approximated the meaning of the Chinese character when it was introduced. As you can imagine, this creates a problem for Japanese learners, especially in the early stages when he or she hasn’t yet absorbed the subtle patterns in these things.
LingoDream solves these two problems by automatically adding hiragana-based pronunciation marks (Furigana) to Kanji and Katakana, so that you can easily learn new Kanji and Katakana through continued exposure by reading Japanese texts. This is done automatically for you by our AI algorithms every time you import or post an article in Japanese.
Moreover, since the standard written Japanese does not contain any space, LingoDream automatically separates Japanese words with whitespaces so that you can click on any word and instantly get dictionary definitions, images, Wikipedia entries, and authentic audio pronunciations recorded by native speakers.
To help you acquire a large vocabulary, besides making reading Japanese texts much easier and enjoyable, LingoDream also utilises spaced repetition and enables you to review or recall context-based vocabulary flash cards at scientific intervals. Sign up today on LingoDream, and become fluent in Japanese soon! Or subscribe to our free newsletter and get more practical language learning tips.
