Hello everyone! I'm a bit new-ish to Renshuu, so I apologize for the inconvenience. I had a question about the Hiragana learning schedule. According to the schedule, there are over a hundred terms to review, but Hiragana supposedly has 46 characters? I learned about something called "Tenten" that modifies existing characters and changes how they're pronounced. Is that why it goes beyond 46?
I'm sorry if I misunderstood anything, and I would appreciate the help. Thank you!
There is also something called maru. The characters being ぱ、ぴ、ぷ、ぺ and ぽ (pa, pi, pu, pe and po respectively. And ぴ (in the form of ぴゃ、ぴゅ、ぴょ pronounced as pya, pyu, pyo) also has 拗音(ようおん) as @リンク • リンク mentioned.
So counting the initial 46 + 25 (I think) in the が、ざ、だ、ば、ぱ lines + the 拗音(ようおん) in きゃ、しゃ、ちゅ、にょ、みゅ、ひゃ、ぴょ etc. (I believe 30) = If my non calculator brain is correct, it is over 100
My math is just average so don't rely on just my responce alone with the numbers and if any one wants to correct me. Go ahead I don't know if it is 25 with the tentens and marus and I also do not know if it is 30 with the 妖艶(ようえん)
Hope this at least kinda makes sense.
edit: just checked the schedule says 104 and I think the number I got in the sum was 101. I don't know what I missed...
There are little lines that go next to the character and change its first sound. For example,つ,(tsu) would becomeづ(dzu).That happens with almost every character exept all the vowels and n that dont have two sounds. Thats why there are so many terms.
So, to see if I understand this right, in addition to 46 base characters, there are several modified ones that alter the pronunciation of the originals? I already know about "tenten"(I think that was the name for it), which makes a つ,(tsu) into a づ(dzu) and so on(thanks, SageLavender!). According to Henrietta, "Maru" is the addition of a "P" sound to characters with that little circle symbol(ぴ is based on "Hi", but with the circle, it becomes "Pi") and a bunch of others that account for the rest of the terms? I THINK I get it?
Well, turns out I have a MUCH longer way to go to master even basic spelling than I thought! Thanks!
Yes, basically, you have the 46 characters. However, the number of pronunciations and changes adds up.
When most of them are voiced, they have a dakuten diacritic mark, and only one row on top of that has a second voiced mark called a handakuten. Used for the "p" sounds from the "b" sounds. Further from that, you take any of those characters which end in the i vowel (except the a row, since you need a consonant) combined with small ゃ, ゅ and ょ, adding up the total.
And all this is just the beginning.
You also have to learn katakana, which has the same amount of possible pronunciations. It's just a different script. You're just about doubling the scripts to use, for the same pronunciations, rather.
There are the 46 base characters あ-ん then the characters like が and ぽ then there’s the combined characters like きゃ and ぴょ with the smaller characters of よ ゆ and や so yes there over a hundred
Oh, this is all the easy part. You'd be using it, particularly hiragana, almost all the time. You'd know it pretty much by heart.
It's that when you get to kanji, you have to figure out readings, and they all have at least one reading. A few also have outliers that you can't find in a dictionary alone. They'd be read from the word they form that way. Otherwise the readings you've studied would be the most common ones, but out in the wild, you're likely gonna guess what it reads if you don't already know the word. Most kanji have at least 2 readings individually to learn (and some specuial rules with readings), and there's thousands of kanji! That's your challenge. Don't sweat it though, since native Japanese people can't remember them all anyway either.
But at least when you learn vocabulary and grammar, what you know and remember would make learning pretty easy. The forgetting part makes it harder than it needs to be.
I was actually kinda curious about Kanji and had a question about that. According to a quick search I did, it's based on Chinese somehow? So when I learn Kanji, I'm basically learning two languages in a way? Is Kanji even necessary when it comes to learning Japanese? It just seems like an entirely different language from my perspective...then again, my perspective IS lacking, so I guess that's why I'm asking.
I was actually kinda curious about Kanji and had a question about that. According to a quick search I did, it's based on Chinese somehow? So when I learn Kanji, I'm basically learning two languages in a way? Is Kanji even necessary when it comes to learning Japanese? It just seems like an entirely different language from my perspective...then again, my perspective IS lacking, so I guess that's why I'm asking.
Not merely "somehow", it actually is basically Chinese characters. But used in the Japanese way.
There's a lot of things you need to understand here, because that's not quite what's going on.
What happened was that a long time ago, Japanese people borrowed hanzi (Chinese characters) for writing. With the way Japanese people spoke, they called it "kanji". They got used to it and have been using it their way ever since. It's because of this that kanji emerged with two types of pronunciations.
Onyomi, is what Chinese sounds like if you used Japanese pronunciation. The "on" part of "onyomi" here literally means "sound". This is one reading that you'll have to remember when you learn that kanji. The second one is kunyomi. One of the meanings for the character used for "kun" means "Japanese reading (of a Chinese character)", which again is another pronunciation and character you will learn later on. The fact this exists is because either one of the two characters have particular uses, and depending on that use, that sound is used. However, it's possible that they have more than one sound for each onyomi and kunyomi sound. It's also possible to have a character that has only sounds, or one sound of one type or the other, and it would be a given due to how rarely that character is used, for either context.
For the other point you brought up. No. You're not learning two languages. It's only one. Japanese. Because when Japanese people use kanji, they use it the Japanese way. Chinese doesn't use the same writing system like Japanese people do, and the fact that hiragana and katakana were developed reinforces Japanese language today, we're just using/learning Japanese here. Clearly, we're not learning Chinese, right? Just Japanese.
It's not like when you're writing in Latin letters when you speak English, that you're actually speaking Latin. Or French. Or German. Not even Spanish. They are their own separate languages, of course! They just happen to share common characters, even if one influences the linguistics of another. They are still different languages regardless of a shared writing system. However, we also have to think in Japanese, since it's also not a Western language.
And for that matter, yes. Kanji is VERY important. VERY, VERY important! Again, it's not like the Western writing system. There's primarily only spaces used between commas, periods and quotes. You'd default to hiragana and that will pose a serious problem on top of that. Words often sound/spell the same, something that speech only solves by intonation. Even if you replaced it with Latin letters so that you could read it, it still would look like a jumbled mess, a very long read of an entire sentence. Kanji solves this problem by using particular characters that also represents some kind of meaning for the word, or the characters are meant to create an abstract of meaning. This clears it up for telling you when there's a word to read and which part is grammar.
but the thing is, after you’ve learned the basic hiragana, the dakuten etc are easy, because they mostly just follow the same patterns. so getting through the hiragana will be a breeze.
