Studying Japanese is not easy. But, with enough motivation and resources, you can definitely learn at least the basics and slowly progress into fluency with actual usage. But, where does one start? I am not a language teacher, and I have mostly learned Japanese through self-study, but I want to help out beginners in getting into the language as easy as possible. To be honest, I am far from my goals in terms of learning Japanese but I like sharing what I know! There’s a lot of resources on the internet already, and it can get overwhelming so I hope I get to share something simple, easy to understand, and something that will really help you out if you’re interested in the language.

My recommendation is to first learn how to read and write Kana, specifically Hiragana. This is a good starting point for getting into Japanese as it is relatively easy to memorize and to write. Hiragana is used widely as 1) furigana, used to explain how a Kanji is read; 2) to conjugate or transform verbs and adjectives for various purposes; and 3) to spell out words for young children who are just starting out with reading/writing Japanese. After you build your mastery of Hiragana, you can then move on to Katakana, which you can think of as a counterpart of each hiragana character you’ve learned. Katakana is used mostly for loan words, foreign words/proper nouns and onomatopoeia (spelling out sounds).

As you learn Japanese vocabulary by reading words spelled out in Kana, you can now start learning how to make basic sentences using Japanese characters. Then you can start getting familiar with Kanji, or the Chinese characters normally used to spell out the words you’ve learned. Learning Kanji is intimidating considering there are over 2,000 characters used normally in daily life – but there are also techniques to this. Let’s cross this bridge when we get there, but for now – let’s start with Hiragana!

Here’s the first five characters for this lesson! I’ve added actual words spelled out in Hiragana so that you can start learning vocabulary, too!

This is how you write A, I, U, E, and O in hiragana.

You can refer to the video below for the pronunciation and stroke order. Specific to stroke order, it’s important to learn it right the first time to prevent having to fix bad habits later on when you’re already used to it.

Take your time to practice writing each character, and also start learning the word examples provided! You can create your own flashcards if you want and build it up for each lesson!

If you have any questions, feel free to drop it in the comments below.