Lesson #1 - Introduction

Japanese is an easy language to pronounce and hear, which is why we keep hearing people utter simple Japanese words like chotto matte, and sayounara. However, most people doesn't pronounce the words correctly, however, lets not go into that at this point. And if you happen to be in Singapore, wasabi is pronounced as wasabe which is totally wrong, but most people think they are right anyways.

Despite that imperfect pronounciation, native Japanese people can still understand you. However, I can't say the same for other languages. The reason is simple, Japanese language in my opinion is a flat language, it sounds flat. Which is why, it can be easily understood even if the speaker does not pronounce the words correctly.

Japanese language employs three different writing systems, i.e. Hiragana, Katagana, and Kanji.
Hiragana looks like this こんにちわ (greetings), while Katagana looks like this シンガポール (Singapore), and Kanji looks like this 勉強 (study).

Katagana are mostly used to write imported words which are originally not found in the vocabulary. Kanji helps to shorten a word into a character or less, instead of using hiragana, example, べんきょうします, is the same as 勉強します. しますdoes not have its Kanji form unlike 勉強 which can be written in its hiragana form as べんきょ.

Unlike Korean, Japanese is easily romanized. Even if you have never spoken or heard Japanese, if you see and try to pronounce the romanized form, you can still be understood. This makes it easy for beginner to pick up.

That's all for lesson 1.