Learning your ABC's in Japanese: Book Review
Japanese translation | General interest
By Andrew McGall
04/27/2008
Americans accustomed to the 26-letter Roman alphabet and the English language may believe they can never enter the impenetrably dense thickets of cross-hatched markings and flowing lines of Asian writing. A Chinese or Japanese newspaper or book might as well be written in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Indeed, the Chinese alphabet that the Japanese adopted is a kind of hieroglyphic system, in that the symbols can represent both sounds and ideas.
Gabriele Mandel's "Japanese Alphabet" is a formal introduction to the 46-character Japanese alphabet. Most of it is a 98-page practical guide to vocalizing consonant-vowel combinations and writing the alpahabet's letters. Here on facing pages for the more poetic hiragana and the simpler katakana forms are each character's sequence of strokes, "voice" and "half-voice" markings, parallel Chinese character and an example of each in four modern print fonts.