How do you learn Japanese alphabet?

Answer 1

There are 4 sets of characters to Japanese "alphabets" in total, called 'Hiragana', 'Katakana' , 'Kanji', and Rōmaji . The first two together are called 'kana'. The last one isn't truly Japanese; it's just a Japanese version of the Latin alphabet.

To learn kana there are easy-to-use tables and comprehensive guides as well as pronunciation helps all over the web, which are just a search away. Kana includes 'syllables' rather than 'letters' since in Japanese phonology there is no consonant, with one exception of 'n'. So letters as we know them in English, are merged with each of the five vowels (a, i, u, e, o) creating syllabic characters. E.g. the group 'B' would be (ba, bi, bu, be, bo). There are 48 main characters in each of the two different kana, which once learnt the rest is easy. But there are also secondary characters formed by merging some main syllables and other processes. Specifically katakana, has more characters than hiragana, since it is used to write foreign terms in Japanese so it needs to provide Japanese writing with non-Japanese syllables.

To learn kanji, which is the main body of the Japanese language, there are course books like minna no nihongo' and 'genki' among others, as well as numerous websites taking you through kanji step by step which can be found via searching.

There is a total of 2136 standardized kanji announced by Japan's Ministry of Education, called 'jouyou' kanji, by learning which you can almost completely understand today's standard Japanese, like in newspapers, TV and such. There are devices called 'denshi jisho' [electronic dictionary] that can be of great help for this case, in addition to several comprehensive online dictionaries.

Rōmaji is something you already know. It is based on the English pronunciation of the Latin alphabet, but with different rules. In the Hebonshiki system, it only has the following letters:

a b ch d e f g h i j k m n o p r s sh t ts u w y z.

Long vowels have a macron over them: example: dō. All consonants except n must have a vowel after them, or "Y" plus a vowel after them: example: kyo. A few combinations, such as ts, ch and sh count as single consonants.