Here are some other interjections to practice:

1. ええと – Err, umm
2. あのう – Umm (usually to get somebody’s attention)
3. あれ？ – huh?
4. えっ – eh?
5. あっ！ – Oh!, Ah!
6. こら！ – hey!
7. うーん – hmm (wondering/pondering)
8. へえ – really? (surprised/impressed)
9. いたっ – ouch
10. よいしょ – when exerting effort such as picking up something heavy

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3. Japanese from Scratch 1.1.4 – t/n sounds If you’re new to this series, check out my previous...

I put a lot of thought into how I would structure my videos and how to fix what I didn’t like about many of the existing videos on Youtube.

Keep it short. Don’t try to be funny.

A lot of videos fill up a lot of time by trying to make things funny and interesting. Unfortunately, not everybody find the same things to be funny and frankly, a lot of the videos I saw were just not funny to me. One of the disadvantages of video vs text is that it’s harder to skim through so I try to keep things as short as possible. Look, you’re probably busy and I know I’M definitely busy. Let’s not waste each other’s time with my poor attempt at humor and just get straight into learning Japanese.

If I want to try to be funny, it’ll be in the Japanese examples. That way, at least, you’re learning something in the process and it may make you more interested in learning the Japanese instead of listening to me ramble on with some stupid joke in English.

Why would you want to stare at my face while you’re trying to learn?

I know Youtube started out as people recording themselves on their webcam but do you seriously need to stare at my face for minutes at a time while trying to learn Japanese? I’m not exactly Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp. I’ve even seen videos of people giving lessons on tiny whiteboards while they take up most of the shot! That’s kind of like sharing a word doc by printing it, scanning it, and emailing the scanned image.

I know watching mouth and body gestures help in learning a language but unfortunately, I don’t have resources to create scenes with staged dialogues. I would love to if I could though.

Cover everything step-by-step

I wanted to have a set progression where a person with zero knowledge of Japanese can start from the first video and learn by watching the videos in order. Too many videos just start kind of in the middle without really going over everything before it in full. I know it’s an ambitious project but I figure no matter how long it takes, the next wave of Japanese learners can benefit with whatever I get done.

As far as I knew, there were no videos for learning Japanese as I just described when I started making them. So today, I saw this video published 4 months after my first video. LOL.

Wow, it’s defintely more professional than my lame Powerpoint slides. And they have more than just one guy (me) that can read the Japanese examples! I’m so jealous. I’m just this dude making videos from my house with a cheap USB mike.

I applaud the “new” format but unfortunately, the grammar explanations suck! 「ＡはＢです」 pattern means “A is B”??? No no no no no! Bad boy! You can’t learn Japanese with sentence patterns!! What are you, an American Japanese linguistics grad student from the 60s?? Please watch my latest video or let me make your slides so I don’t have to spend all my time trying to make these videos by myself. Argh!

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Since I’m no longer living in Japan, I’ve been trying to learn baby-related words mostly on the internet. Since just looking up words in the dictionary almost never works if it’s from English to Japanese, I learn by reading sites like this one. It helps to be prepared in case I want to talk about my baby in Japanese.

Wow, Japanese sure is dependent on Katakana.
ベビーカー – stroller
ベビーベッド – crib
ベビー布団 – baby futon
ベビーチェア – baby chair (seems like mostly high chairs)

はいはい – crawl
伝い歩き – cruise
子守唄 – lullaby
つみき – building blocks

Somehow I don’t need to have a real baby to know all the English words. Just goes to show how great immersion is.

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Ok, let’s learn some Kanji today! You’ll see that it’s not so scary!

口【くち】 – mouth
Just picture an open mouth except um… more square. This box shows up ALL THE TIME in Kanji so MAKE SURE you get the correct stroke order.

五【ご】 – five
I guess it kind of looks like 5 with a line on the bottom

日【ひ】- sun; day
Similar to mouth, it’s a circle made into a square with a line in the middle to represent sun rays or something.

木【き】 – tree
Pretty much exactly how I would draw a tree (my drawing skills are terrible)

本【ほん】 – root; book
The Kanji itself means root. As you can see it’s a tree with a line on the trunk bottom to emphasis a root. It’s also the word for book as in “books are the root of all knowledge”. Quaint, ain’t it?

日本【に・ほん】 – Japan
Root of the sun, you know, the “Land of the Rising Sun”? It would be pretty hot over there if it were really the case.

言う【い・う】 – to say
言 is like four lines of dialogue or sound waves on top of a mouth (notice the first top stroke is slanted). Easy!

語【ご】 – language
Combine the radicals for “say”, “five” and “mouth” and you get the single character for language. To say with five mouths, I guess it kinda makes sense. It’s not a word by itself but you can just tack it onto countries to describe that country’s language such as スペイン語 = Spanish. Cool!

日本語【に・ほん・ご】 – Japanese (language)
Just tack on the character for language to the word for Japan to get Japanese as mentioned above.

Ok, let’s make a sentence with KANJI!

これは日本語でなんと言いますか？
What is this called in Japanese?
lit: As for this, what do you say in Japanese?

Replace これ with whatever you want to know the Japanese word for.

Hopefully this will give you an idea of how to make up mnemonics for memorizing Kanji.

MAKE SURE to practice after checking the stroke order which you can see here:
http://jisho.org/kanji/details/口五日木本言語

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I’ve now created a facebook group to connect with other Japanese learners.

My facebook group for learning Japanese

Not sure what I’m going to do with it. I’m just playing around with the idea.

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http://www.facebook.com/taekimjapanese

いまさらですけど、暇つぶしにFacebookのアカウントを作りました。何に使うかさっぱりですので、今のところ、なんにもないですよ。

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Also, Bing seems to be pretty much exactly the same as Yahoo now.

Lame.

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What I haven’t mention yet is that each word I pick is a word I just learned personally. Usually, I pick a word from my dictionary history, which has things I looked up recently while reading books or listening to podcasts and then search around for something online that uses that word. It’s actually more for myself than anything as it allows me to review a word I just learned in a different context. At first, it annoyed me that I couldn’t just add a bunch and schedule them to appear later on twitter. But it’s actually helping me to memorize the word because it may be a few days after I learned it that I actually post it. As fans of SRS know, it’s best to not think about a word for a while before conjuring it up again.

If you’d like to try your own WOTD on twitter, post a link to your account in the comments so I can follow you. Don’t just post the word though (which is same as looking it up in the dictionary). Try to find a sentence that uses the word and post a link to the source.

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1. Working on improving my vocabulary and writing (on lang-8) in Japanese
2. Japanese from scratch youtube videos
3. The Complete Guide to Japanese
4. Adding vocab lists to the Grammar guide to make it ebook friendly
5. Learning Chinese (not really)
6. This blog

I also just started posting WOTD (Word of the Day) on my twitter account.

https://twitter.com/#!/kimchi314

My free time is limited so many of these projects inevitably get neglected sometimes. But I like to jump around and work on different things to keep things interesting for myself. After all, it is my hobby and primarily for my personal enjoyment.

I’d like to figure out why my website ranks so low when you do a search for “learn Japanese” on various search engines. My website is WAY better than many of the sites on the first page of the search results. Anybody have some good SEO tips?

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I know I keep saying we’re done with Hiragana only to have another lesson with more sounds in Hiragana. Well, we’re almost done with learning all the sounds in Hiragana. In this lesson, we’re going to learn how to attach a /y/ vowel sound to another consonant and how to make a double consonant sound. Once more lesson after this, and we will be done with Hiragana!

Reading Practice

Here’s a list of random vocabulary you should read over for some simple reading practice. Once again, don’t worry about memorizing the definitions.

1. いしゃ – doctor
2. おちゃ – tea
3. りょくちゃ – green tea
4. にんじゃ – ninja
5. しゅと – capital (city)
6. しゃしん – photograph
7. まっちゃ – (ceremonial) green tea
8. しっぽ – tail
9. じゃっかん – slightly
10. ざっし – magazine
11. もっと – more
12. けっちゃく – conclusion

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（僕にとって）世界一かわいい赤ちゃんの大冒険：伝説の珍獣に遭遇！

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*So if you set your language settings for your PS3 to Japanese, the trophies are translated into Japanese for some games even if the game itself doesn’t have a lick of Japanese in it.

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So actually, while we learned all the Hiragana characters, there’s still more sounds to be learned using the same Hiragana characters we’ve already learned. In this lesson, we’re going to be learning the voiced consonants, which are indicated by two small lines or circle (only for /p/ sounds) in the upper-right of the character. There are five voiced consonant sounds: /g/, /z/, /d/, /b/, and /p/.

On computers or other digital displays, a small font can make it hard to distinguish between the lines and small circle (ex: 「ば／ぱ」) so make sure to increase the font if you’re having trouble seeing the circle. You can easily do this in your browser by using the “Zoom” functionality in the “View” menu.

Sounds to watch for

Learning to read and write these sounds is not very hard since you’ve already learned the characters. The pronunciations are pretty much what you would expect except for: 「じ」 and 「ぢ」. Both are pronounced “ji”. 「ぢ」 is very rarely used and normally only in voiced Kanji readings which we will learn about later so you’ll see 「じ」 more often than not for “ji”. 「づ」 is also usually only used as a voiced Kanji reading of 「つ」. It sounds almost identical to 「ず」 except for a slight press of the tongue to the roof of your mouth for a faint “d” sound at the beginning. It should sound like “dzu”.

Reading Practice

Here’s a list of random vocabulary you should read over for some simple reading practice. Once again, don’t worry about memorizing the definitions.

1. ご – five
2. ふじさん – Mt. Fuji
3. はなぢ – nosebleed
4. ひづけ – (calendar) date
5. にぎりずし – nigiri sushi
6. びじん – beautiful person
7. ともだち – friend
8. ざぶとん – cushion
9. ぱん – bread
10. じかん – time
11. おんど – temperature
12. つぎ – next
13. かばん – bag
14. おんがく – music
15. ぴあの – piano
16. うで – arm
17. おび – belt
18. かぐ – furniture
19. ちず – map
20. ぷりん – pudding
21. かぞく – family
22. みず – water
23. おぺら – opera
24. かぜ – wind
25. かげ – shadow
26. ぼく – me;myself;I (masculine)
27. いべんと – event
28. ばれんたいん – valentine
29. ぽけもん – Pokemon

Also check out my page on Hiragana.
My Youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/taekimjapanese

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To summarize, the way I learn vocab is by sheer volume and in context. Reading, in particular, is how I learned most of the vocabulary I know. And boy is there a lot of vocabulary to learn. I know enough Kanji at this point that I can pretty much guess the reading of words most of the time. So I look up a lot of words and very quickly. Now, can I say that I’ve completely memorized all those words? Not by any means, but they’re definitely in my brain somewhere, one step closer to memorization until the next time they come up.

Here’s what my recent dictionary history looks like. Yes, after 10 years since I started my website for learning Japanese, I’m still learning all these words. Now, should you memorize my words? Absolutely not, you should encounter your own words in context of whatever you’re reading or hearing.

先達
散会
セキセイインコ
実直
硬直
一抹
達観
投擲
剛勇
精進
打診
際どい
儚い
轟く
咀嚼
靡く
求心
やんわり
被る（こうむる）
反芻
追憶
匙を投げる
博愛
修辞
慈しむ
粗悪
慇懃
冬来たりなば春遠からじ
曲解
訓告
しっぺ返し
すっぱ抜く
武勲
ぷっちぎり
驀進
弛緩
嘲弄
暇乞い
闖入
牧歌
寸劇
出鼻
帳（とばり）
うなだれる
真摯
ふてくされる
親睦
戯れ
丁々発止
明晰
憐憫
なまじっか
迸る
山彦
稚拙
おべんちゃら
喧騒
剛健
自負
軋轢
どんぴしゃり
しらばくれる
刹那
うたた寝
etc, etc.

Boy, learning a language is a lot of work. Share some of your dictionary history in the comments!

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In this lesson, we will learn how to read and write the remaining Hiragana characters.

Sounds to watch for

The /r/ sound is notoriously difficult for English speakers. It is a hard sound between “r” and “l”. You want to make sure that you flick your tongue against the roof of your mouth, similar to how Spanish speakers roll their r’s.

The last few sounds don’t really follow the convention that we’re used to. There is no “yi”, “ye”, “wi”, “wu”, or “we” sounds.* And while 「を」 technically is a “wo” sound, it sounds exactly the same as “o” （お） in practice. As you’ll later learn, 「を」 is only used for grammatical purposes and not as part of regular words. Therefore, it will not show up in the reading practice below.

Finally, as the only consonant-only sound, 「ん」 is an curious anomaly. It comes after another sound to add a “n” or “m” consonant sound. I find that if you always pronounce it as “n”, nobody really notices the difference.

Reading Practice

Here’s a list of other vocab you should read over for some simple reading practice. Once again, don’t worry about memorizing the definitions.

1. そら – sky
2. やま – mountain
3. しろ – white
4. ゆき – snow
5. よる – night
6. りす – squirrel
7. おふろ – bath
8. わたし – me, myself, I
9. さん – three
10. よん – four
11. ふとん – futon
12. ゆめ – dream
13. みらい – future
14. むり – impossible
15. みる – to see
16. れんこん – lotus root (used in Japanese cooking)

Congratulations, you’ve learned all of Hiragana! We’re almost done with all the sounds in Japanese. Review the complete Hiragana chart here.
My Youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/taekimjapanese

*Classical Japanese does have “wi” （ゐ） and “we” （ゑ） but they are no longer used.

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In this lesson, we learn how to read and write the /h/ and /m/ consonant sounds in Hiragana.

Sounds to watch for

Most of the sounds in this section are exactly how you would expect except for 「ふ」, which is a weird sound somewhere between “who” and “fu”. Basically, your mouth when pronouncing “who” (as in “Doctor Who”) is an open circle while “fu” (as in “kung fu”) is completely closed with your top teeth touching your bottom lip. However, 「ふ」 lies directly in between the two sounds almost as if you’re trying to pronounce both at the same time. In practice, probably nobody will really notice anything wrong if you pronounce it as just “fu”. Incidentally, this is the sound for words like “Fuji” and “futon” so obviously we hear it as “fu” and not “hu”.

Reading Practice

Here’s a list of other vocab you should read over for some simple reading practice. Once again, don’t worry about memorizing the definitions.

1. ふく – clothes
2. はこ – box
3. ほし – star
4. ふた – lid
5. へい – soldier
6. ひく – to pull
7. ふえ – flute
8. へた – unskillful
9. め – eye
10. うみ – sea
11. のむ – to drink
12. きもの – kimono
13. いま - now
14. まめ – bean
15. みみ – ear
16. かも – duck

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In this lesson, we learn how to write the /t/ and /n/ consonant sounds in Hiragana.

The best way to practice writing is to use plain old-fashion pen and paper. You can download the Hiragana practice writing sheet here:
http://japanese-lesson.com/characters/hiragana/hiragana_writing.html

Sounds to watch for

Japanese doesn’t necessarily follow how we would normally expect consonant and vowel combinations to sound like. While most are pronounced how you would expect, 「ち」 is actually pronounced “chi” (instead of “tee”). Another very tricky sound for English speaker is 「つ」 which is a sound that really has no equivalent in English. To pronounce 「つ」 (“tsu”), try forming an “o” with your mouth as if you’re pronouncing “sue” and add a hard “t” sound at the start of the sound by touching your tongue to the back of your teeth.

It is often difficult at first to distinguish between 「す」 and 「つ」. The word for “moon” and the adjective for liking something is often used as an example. I got the sample audio files below from forvo.com. Can you notice the hard “t” sound that’s only in the first clip?

• つき – moon
• すき – likable

Reading Practice

Admittedly, learning random vocabulary is not very useful but it is good reading practice so do read over the list below but don’t worry about memorizing the definitions.

1. いち – one
2. て – hand
3. たつ – to stand
4. たこ – octopus
5. かつ – to win
6. に – two
7. なに – what
8. ぬの – fabric
9. すな – sand
10. おかね – money
11. しぬ – to die
12. ぬく – to extract, to pull out

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In this lesson, we learn the next two columns in the Hiragana chart: the /k/ and /s/ sounds.

Have you noticed that the new sounds have the same vowels we just learned in the last segment? As we learn more of Hiragana, we simply add a new consonant with the 5 vowels we already learned.

Handwritten vs type

The best way to practice writing is to use plain old-fashion pen and paper. You can download the Hiragana practice writing sheet here:
http://japanese-lesson.com/characters/hiragana/hiragana_writing.html

Just like how we would never write “a” by hand how it looks in a computer font, some Hiragana characters are not written they way they look typed on a computer.

1. If you compare the Hiragana for “ki” and “sa” below with the version in the practice sheet, you’ll notice that there’s a gap in the handwritten version not in the typed version.
   き versus

   さ vs

2. 「せ」 is also not usually written with such a large hook in the second stroke as it displayed by most computer fonts. In fact, many (including myself) write it with no hook at all.
   せ vs
3. 「そ」 is fine written exactly the way it looks typed. However, you can also decide to write the first stroke differently as shown below, making it two strokes。
   そ vs

There’s no single “correct” way to write these characters and often depends on personal preference. Keep an eye out for these discrepancies and go with what works best for you.

Sushi and other tidbits

Now you know how to write “sushi” in Hiragana: 「すし」. However, in Japanese, it is usually called 「おすし」. 「お」 is an honorific prefix that is used before certain words such as “money” or “store”. I’m not really sure why. Another thing you may often see in sushi restaurants is 「しそ」, that green leaf used for decoration that I personally never eat.

Reading Practice

So what kind of words can you say with /k/? How about romantic love? While 「あい」 is a very deep kind of love nurtured with time and effort, 「こい」 describes more of a romantic, exciting, or infatuation type of love. The same word is also used for “koi” fish, of course! If you ever go to a fancy Japanese restaurant that has a koi pond, you should say, “You know, these fish are called 「こい」 in Japanese.” They probably already knew that but they would be impressed if only they could see that you said it in Hiragana.

Speaking of homophones, the word 「かき」 has over 10 different meanings including “oyster” and “persimmon”. Those two can be particularly difficult to sort out in a conversation since they’re both edible. Because Japanese has many homophones, most of these words are written in Kanji or Chinese characters. But we still use Hiragana to describe how the Kanji is read or pronounced. Don’t worry, we’ll get to it all soon enough.

Here are some other words for additional reading practice using the /k/ and /s/ sounds.

1. あか – red
2. いけ – lake
3. いく – to go
4. かく – to write
5. あし – foot; leg
6. あさ – morning
7. いす – chair
8. かさ – umbrella
9. あせ – sweat
10. うそ – lie
11. （お）すし – sushi
12. せかい – world

With 「あか」, we now know 2 of the 3 traffic light colors. And unlike green/blue, they do use “red” for red light in Japan (and yellow). Here’s a random, scandalous tidbit: in Japanese, the verb 「いく」 is used for orgasms instead of “to come”, basically the opposite of English. But I wouldn’t recommend practicing this!

Um, anyway, why don’t you play around with this cool koi flash thingamajig and feed the fish. Until next time!

Bored with feeding the fish? Check out my page on Hiragana.

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The best way to practice writing is to use plain old-fashion pen and paper. You can download the Hiragana practice writing sheet here:
http://japanese-lesson.com/characters/hiragana/hiragana_writing.html

Here are the example words from the lesson with some additions for extra reading practice.

1. あい – love
2. あお – blue
3. いえ – house
4. うえ – above
5. おい – nephew
6. おう – to chase
7. あう – to meet

Here’s a odd tidbit. Did you know what we call “green” for a green traffic light is called 「あお」 in Japan? Actually, it IS kind of blue in Japan depending on how you look at it so it’s not that strange.

The sound 「おう」 is also an interjection used to express an “informal affirmative response“. So next time somebody says, “Let’s do it!” You can respond 「おう！」 instead of “yeah!”. Practicing interjections in Japanese is a great way to start sounding and maybe even feeling a bit more Japanese.

Hungry for more? Check out my page on Hiragana.
My Youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/taekimjapanese

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I am trying out a new series called “Japanese from Scratch” by making videos that go over Japanese in small steps in a quick, no-nonsense fashion. In this first video, I do a brief overview of the 3 writing systems in Japanese to give you some context before jumping straight into Hiragana. Post your questions, suggestions, and feedback here or on the video page for future videos.

My Youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/taekimjapanese

*I will be updating and re-posting the old posts in this category as I make the videos.

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I’ve been meaning to write about this in a post sitting in my draft folder since early 2008. Oops. But now you can read about it and get some reading practice at the same time. Like she says, the only reason English speakers have a reason to confuse the two is because they happen to translate to the same word in English: “should”. But that word itself has many different meanings so it’s yet another example of why you should avoid translating to English as much as possible.

Formal Suggestions

I would add that 「べき」 is a fairly formal phrase to use when making suggestions. So you normally wouldn’t use it to suggest eating more vegetables, for example. In a conversational setting, you should stick with 「～方がいい」. In English, it’s more formal to say “it’s better to…” as compared to “you should…” but it’s the exact opposite for Japanese.

Awkward: 野菜をもっと食べるべきだ。
Conversational: 野菜をもっと食べた方がいいよ。

A bit of uncertainty

I would also add that 「はず」 is not always used with absolute certainty. In English, people often say “supposed to” to try to avoid accountability and 「はず」 can be used the same way.

Ａ：あれ？田中さんはまだ連絡がないの？
Ａ：Huh? No word from Tanaka-san?

Ｂ：そう。昨日までに連絡をくれるはずだったのに…
Ｂ：That’s right. Even though (he/she) was supposed to contact (me) by yesterday.

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1. これ – this
2. それ – that
3. あれ – that (over there)
4. どれ – which
5. ここ – here
6. そこ – there
7. あそこ – over there
8. どこ – where

Most will also probably learn the shortened version of 「これの」 etc. such as 「この」. And that’s usually about all that’s ever covered even though there’s a bunch more 「こ」、「そ」、「あ」 vocabulary that are really useful! So let’s look at a few.

Like this/that

You know how you’re not supposed to use the word “like” all the time. Well, we all do anyway because it’s so useful, right? The 「こう、そう、ああ」 series of words are arguably just as useful.

If somebody asks you how to do something, one common answer is “do it like this or that” and that’s exactly what 「こう、そう、ああ」 means. Now you see where 「そうです」 comes from.

A: この漢字はどう書くんですか？
A: How do you write this Kanji?

B: こう書きます。
B: You write it like this.

The real power from these words come when you combine them with 「いう」 to define what something is like. The English equivalent would be “this/that kind of thing”. It’s a great way to talk about abstract or complicated matters.

Examples

1. そういう難しい話は、よくわかんないよ。
   I don’t understand that kind of difficult talk (topic).
2. こういう時には、本当に何もする気がないんだよな。
   Really don’t feel like doing anything in times like these.

You can extend this further by attaching 「風」 (pronounced 「ふう」 in this case), to describe a certain way of doing things.

1. この漢字はこういう風に書くのよ。
   You write this Kanji in this kind of style/manner.

This/that much?

Another incredibly useful series of words are: 「こんな、そんな、あんな」. Combined with the 「に」 particle, these words will allow you to say common things like “Are you that hungry?” or “Did you have to buy this much?”. You can also use them without the 「に」 particle but the meaning is a bit hard to explain and is not used as often (in my opinion).

Examples

1. そんなにお腹が空いているの？
   Are you that hungry?
2. こんなにたくさん買う必要があったの？
   Did you have to buy this much?

Comparison

If you’ve learned the grammar for comparisons, you are probably already familiar with the phrase 「どちらの方が」. This literally means “which way” which you can obviously answer with “this or that way”. It can also be used for plain directions as well, of course.

1. こちら – this
2. そちら – that
3. あちら – that (over there)

Etc

There are others like 「こいつ、そいつ、あいつ」 that I’m not going to discuss here. I don’t want to be accused of corrupting the pure and proper Japanese that is taught in most classes.

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Other words I learned recently: いちゃもん、抗生物質、放射線. The last obviously being a word on the minds of everyone in Japan. On an even more personal note, this is my first post written entirely on my phone. Yay!

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