My old -5954 phone number is gone as of yesterday. If you need my new new number, send me email.

… back to the cave.

Linux

A popular method on Linux is SCIM + anthy. SCIM provides an input method engine that supports multiple languages, while anthy provides the Japanese-specific components.

You can use a panel button or a hot key to switch between input modes. While in Japanese input mode, you enter rōmaji and the IM converts it to kana or kanji; this occurs directly in whatever application you’re running (terminal, editor, document, web browser, etc.). Alternately, you can pop up a dialog that lets you click on buttons to enter the characters; this works similarly to Character Map, but has many more options and is specific to the language you’re using.

If SCIM and anthy are not already installed, you can browse in your software package manager for these names specifically or look for something similar to “Japanese Language Support”. The actual package names may vary from distribution to distribution.

If you use Fedora 9 or later, you can enter “yum install scim-lang-japanese” at the command line, which will install everything you need.

Windows

Microsoft Windows uses the IME (Input Method Editor), which works similarly to SCIM/anthy above. If you have installed Microsoft Office or upgraded Internet Explorer, you may already have some of the appropriate software installed.

For Windows XP, the following steps should get you started. I’ve not installed or used IME myself, so I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this.

To configure support, follow this path: Start -> Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options.
Select the Languages tab, then check “Install files for East Asian Languages”. You will need your Windows Installation (or Recovery) CD to install the files.

On that same tab (Languages), click the “Details…” button to get to “Text Services and Input Languages”.
Select the Settings tab, the press the “Language Bar…” button to get to “Language Bar Settings”.
Here you can set whether the Language Bar is shown on the desktop and/or the taskbar.

Note: extracted and expanded from Introduction.

すべての人間は、生まれながらにして自由であり、
かつ、尊厳と権利と について平等である。
人間は、理性と良心とを授けられており、
互いに同胞の精神をもって行動しなければならない。

If you’re using IE8, you may have to click on the “Compatibility Mode” button to display the kanji characters; hiragana and katakana display fine without it. (MS’s handling of “compatibility” in IE is a rant for another day.)

If the sample above still doesn’t look right, you may need to install some additional fonts.

Installing Fonts

For basic information on installing Japanese fonts, see Help:Installing Japanese character sets on Wikipedia.

Linux

For Linux, use your software package manager to browse for Japanese fonts. Package names may vary from distribution to distribution.

Under Fedora, for example, “yum install fonts-japanese” should be sufficient.

Windows

Microsoft provides ClearType fonts; just Google for “Japanese ClearType fonts for Windows”. The package for XP may have been replaced with a “Vista”-tagged title, but it is also for XP.

Note: extracted from Introduction

For a quick introduction you may want to view these articles: “Pronunciation of Japanese” provides a sample reading (from the beginning of Natsume Soseki’s classic novel Botchan) along with the text in both rōmaji and hiragana, and a few practice word lists; “Japanese/Pronunciation” discusses the basic rules and guidelines for pronunciation, along with audio samples; “Japanese phonology” goes into much greater technical detail.

Rōmaji transcription is only approximate. For example, the sound of “ん” may be [n], [m], or [ng]; the sound transcribed by convention as “r” is closer to a blend of English [l], [r], and [d].

One kana symbol corresponds to one syllable, of which there are five types:

• five basic vowels: [a], [i], [u], [e], and [o]
• consonant + vowel: [na], [ki], [yu], …
• syllabic consonant: [n]/[m]
• doubled consonants: “kk”, “tt”, …
• contracted syllable: for example, [ki] + [ya] = [kya], [chi] + [ya] = [cha], …

The vowels are always distinct, never blended, and they have only one pronunciation. For example, “oi” is “oh-ee”, not like “oy” in English “boy”; the words “aoi” and “iie” are each pronounced with three syllables.

All syllables are of equal stress and duration. Accent, when used, is conveyed by a tone or pitch change (high-to-low) rather than by loudness.

The first table below shows the rōmaji and hiragana syllabary of Japanese. The katakana syllabary is the same; just replace the symbols. The second table shows additional katakana symbols used to write “foreign” syllables.

Kana each consist of 46 basic symbols representing syllables, along with a few diacritics to to extend them.

Hiragana (平仮名 – ひらがな – ヒラガナ), which has a more rounded or cursive style, is used primarily for syntax and grammar markup, native words that don’t have kanji, and to annotate or substitute for less well known kanji.

Katakana (片仮名 – かたかな – カタカナ), which has a more angular style, is used primarily for words of foreign origin (other than Chinese), non-Chinese/Japanese names, and for emphasis (similar to the use of italics in English).

Kanji (漢字) are Chinese characters. They are used for their meanings, for their sounds, or both. This is highly context dependent, so a single character may have several (in some cases over 10) radically different “readings”; thus the need for furigana or rubi, the tiny kana annotations you sometimes see above or beside kanji.

Basic literacy requires knowing about 2000 kanji, specified by the government as part of the school curriculum. Well-educated adults tend to know 1-3000 more. There is a separate, smaller but overlapping list of kanji which are approved for use in proper names.

Rōmaji (ローマ字) uses the Latin alphabet to write Japanese phonetically. It is primarily used for foreign readers and computer input (the input method software converts it into “real” Japanese characters). While the most common romanization system is Hepburn, several others exist; collections of older documents in particular show a greater variety in spelling.

Updates

2009-12-04: added Kana chart

By the way, this series isn’t about teaching you Japanese, but to relate my learning experience and perhaps provide you some help in finding resources if you decide to learn on your own.

This introduction will be revised occasionally to keep in sync with the series. Latest revision: 2009-12-10.

Why learn Japanese?

Perhaps it would have made more sense, demographically, for me to have chosen Spanish, but day to day I don’t have any chance to use or even listen to it. On the other hand, ever since a friend of mine got me interested in anime, I have an ongoing opportunity use of Japanese.

Then there’s the esthetic qualities of the writing system. Japanese offers a rich set of characters and a beautiful tradition of calligraphy to follow. I’ve always enjoyed the physical act of writing, and still do most of my personal composition (except for blog posts) long hand. There’s something pleasing about the touch and motions of writing, seeing the characters and words form on the page, how the weight and form of the characters can vary — much more expressive than typing the same old boring glyphs over and over into a digital document. Hand-written text has much more character (sorry), what with the scratch-throughs, the annotations, the doodles in the margins.

Next there is the challenge. Japanese has a reputation for being especially difficult for Westerners to learn, in part due to the added burden of having to learn three new character sets, one of which contains thousands of symbols. Bluntly, my memory sucks — as my friends and coworkers can verify, both from experiencing the effects of it and from my complaints about it. I don’t think I’ve learned anything substantial by rote in decades, at least that I can remember; so this is a great opportunity to enjoy exercising those mental muscles. For example, the pleasure of something as simple as this: seeing “ま“ change from trigger the thought “that is the glyph that represents the sound ‘ma’” to directly experiencing it as “ma”.

Finally, Japanese is significantly different from most Western languages. I suspect that if I learned one of the romance languages, I would be much more likely to treat it as if it were “just” English with new words and somewhat altered syntax and grammar. With Japanese, I hope I’ll be kept more “honest” due to the sentence structure and word order, topic vs subject, particles, tense concepts, levels of politeness and formality, much greater dependency on context (it takes “omit needless words” seriously), ….

Finally++ … well, sometimes, I just want to do something unexpected (for me). You’re learning Spanish? Ho hum; you’re learning Japanese? WTF?

Series Overview

A few days ago I made a more or less off-the-cuff post about learning hiragana, with the idea that I’d make occasional posts as I progressed. Since then I’ve decided to make this a series for two reasons: to play with the Organize Series plugin for WordPress, and to serve as a goad to keep me studying — I’ll be less likely to quit if I know someone is watching. Here’s what I have planned so far:

Introduction

What you’re reading right now.

Computer Fonts

How to get your system to display Japanese fonts. Needed for the rest of the series.

Writing System

An overview of the three distinct character sets used to write Japanese and the way they are transliterated into the Roman/Latin alphabet.

Computer Input

The software needed to simplify entering Japanese and Chinese characters.

Pronunciation

A quick look at pronouncing Japanese.

Kana – Hiragana and Katakana

An overview of the two syllabary scripts used to write Japanese.

Kana Practice

Details on ways to learn the kana characters, how they are written, and resources for practice.

Kanji

An overview of the ideographic characters adapted from Chinese.

Kanji Practice

Details on ways to learn the kanji characters, how they are written, and resources for practice.

Resources

Once the series is finished I’ll compile a summary of resources I’ve mentioned in previous posts.

Japanese is one of the hardest languages for westerners to learn. The written language is exotic and entirely opaque to me. Before even getting into simple syntax and grammar, I have to overcome the barrier of a truly foreign writing system.

The Japanese writing system uses three different components: hiragana (a rounded script), katakana (an angular script), and kanji (Chinese characters), along with some Latin alphabet and Arabic numerals thrown in for effect. Romaji is the writing of Japanese phonetically with the Latin alphabet — for example, the names of the components just listed.

The kana (hiragana and katakana) both consist of 46 basic symbols (roughly, representing syllables) and minor modifiers to extend the them. Hiragana is used primarily for syntax/grammar markup, native words, and annotating kanji. Katakana is used primarily for foreign words and emphasis (similar to italics in English).

Kanji are essentially Chinese characters. Basic literacy requires knowing about 2000 kanji — which doesn’t sound quite so bad if you consider them as (roughly) words rather than characters. Much better than the 50,000 or more for Chinese!

From what I’ve read, it appears that it is best to learn hiragana first, then katakana. Finally, learn kanji “as you go” through your language study.

Web Resources

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about Hiragana:

Hiragana (平仮名, ひらがな or ヒラガナ) is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana, kanji, and the Latin alphabet (Rōmaji). Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems, in which each character represents one mora. Each kana is either a vowel such as “a” (あ); a consonant followed by a vowel such as “ka” (か); or “n” (ん), a nasal sonorant which, depending on the context, sounds either like English m, n, or ng (IPA: [ŋ]), or like the nasal vowels of French. — from the Wikipedia article “Hiragana”

The “HA” image that opens this post is taken from a table showing the stroke order for hiragana. Stroke order is even more important in kanji.

Googling for “learn hiragana” or “learn japanese” will lead you to many resources, so I won’t repeat that information here.

Hardcopy Resources

I got started on this rather casually — I printed out the hiragana table and over several days, as I had time, practiced writing the characters. Once I determined I really wanted to learn Japanese, I decided I’d better get some real learning material.

Not too systematically, I scanned Amazon and decided on a set of workbooks: “Let’s learn X” for each of hiragana, katakana, and kanji. These seem good enough to begin with — I can always get additional texts as I need them.

The first book “Let’s Learn Hiragana”, by Yasuko Kosaka Mitamura, is only 70 some odd pages, but covers technique, drills, and provides a small vocabulary. The publisher’s book page is at Kodansha International, but is available from Amazon.

Flash Cards

Even more important, I believe, is a good set of flash cards. Don’t make them yourself — buy a set. The “Kana Flashcards” from White Rabbit Press are excellent and are also available from Amazon. You can see full-size samples of the cards at the White Rabbit Press link.

Software

While the workbook and flash cards are good resources, nothing beats practice, practice, practice. You can find a number of web-based and desktop applications for practice, but I threw together a quick and dirty perl script that I can use in a terminal window (click on image for full-sized view):

I simply slide it partially off-screen to hide the right-hand column. I copy (for practice) the left-hand column to paper and write the answers, then slide the screen back into view to check my answers. This version only displays one line per keypress, but could be easily altered to scroll N lines at a time.

Notice that it displays items in random order and mixes both the hiragana and romaji representations, so that I get practice in both directions. At the moment, at least, I prefer this over more sophisticated software because I need the physical writing practice.

The perl source is available here: hiragana-drill.txt. I’d recommend getting the text file rather than trying to cut and paste it from here.