Articles for Learning

Have you ever confused the bird crane with the lifting machine at construction sites? The word “crane” is a homonym; it is spelled the same way but can mean different things. In Japanese, homographs exist too, and they can be hard to distinguish at the beginning. Let’s master them by paying attention to the three clues: kanji, context, and intonation!   

There’s good news and bad news with learning Japanese. The bad news is there’s three alphabets, two with about 50 characters, and a third, Kanji, with 2-3,000. The good news is the first alphabet you learn, Hiragana, has sounds that are repeated for the rest of the alphabets. So once you’ve mastered Hiragana.