I made this group as a place for people of all levels of Japanese to practice and share their experiences, and to teach those who are just starting. Being a learner of Japanese for three years, I know how hard it can be to study all by yourself with noone to tell you what to look for or where.
I would like to invite people who are just starting to learn to join us because there are some very valuable things you can hear from the people who already did the baby steps, both about Japanese and learning in general.
i have seen the video and try to read the tittle of the video with the help of google translate T_T
but there are some alphabet in the song are not included in the video tittle...
such as ga and de
also this last alphabet in the tittle
why is that?
The title is not meant to display all the characters. Roman transliteration of the title is "hiragana dekiru ka na? ~a i u e o no uta". It means "Can you read hiragana? Song of the a, i u e o(vowels)".
The last character in the title is called 'kanji'. It literally means 'Chinese character'. Japanese uses three sets of characters called hiragana, katakana and kanji.
Hiragana and katakana are phonetically the same; if you know how to pronounce one, you can pronounce the other, and they both contain exactly the same characters(actually, katakana has some additional oddballs, but more on that later). Graphically, you can think of them as two (very) different fonts, or if latin script is what you're used to, block letters and handwriting.
Grammatically however, their roles are very different. You'll often hear people saying that hiragana is the 'glue' of the Japanese language. Hiragana is used to give grammatical sense to content words. For example, if I said "I eat friend cake yesterday." it wouldn't make much sense, but that is pretty much how Japanese looks like if you just erase all the hiragana. Continuing the analogy, if I said "I ate my...", what makes the difference between 'eat' and 'ate' in Japanese is hiragana. If I said "...friend's cake...", 'friend'->'friend's' is also hiragana. and so on.
Katakana on the other hand has a completely different use. It's used to approximate the sounds of non-sino-japanese words(the ones not coming from China). So for example the word for bread in Japanese is 'pan'(パン) which is a loanword from Portugese written in katakana. It is used a lot in modern Japanese with all the western influences and loanwords.
Kanji is a story by itself, so I'd put it off for some other day. For further reading into this subject, I recommend:
Kanjidamage- this guy is seriously awesome
Tae Kim - he makes sense of grammar like no written textbook does
