As native English-speakers learning Japanese, there are a few extra tools that’ll really help you make sense of what’s going on in the more complex Japanese sentences. In this lesson I want to introduce you to one of them l call “chunking.” Long Japanese sentences can look complicated and complex when they’re actually very simple, structurally. 

Let's face it, 漢字 kanji is torture. It is. It's Chinese characters that have been tweaked to *fit into Japanese, and have both Chinese readings, 音読み on'yomi, and Japanese readings, 訓読み kun'yomi. Not to mention that a lot of kanji has the same exact reading as other kanji...

It's always confusing for new learners to become masters at reading and writing Japanese, especially because Japanese has three "alphabets" instead of one. Luckily, you have come to the right place to get better at all three, but in particular, Katakana...

The most daunting yet fulfilling to learn alphabet in Japanese is Kanji. Kanji literally means “Chinese character,” because literally the alphabet derived from Chinese characters. In English, it’s similar in that the roman alphabet came from Latin, however Japanese Kanji words and Chinese words are actually quite similar. 

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.