Get started learning to speak and read Japanese. Use these japanese cucumber salad lessons for vocabulary, grammar, expressions, pronunciation, and comprehension. Namiko Abe is a Japanese language teacher and translator, as well as a Japanese calligraphy expert. She has been a freelance writer for nearly 20 years.

The Japanese language will seem very different at first from your native language, but it is not as hard to learn as many people think. It is quite a logically laid out language and once you learn basic reading skills it will be easy to pronounce any word you can read. Familiarize yourself with Japanese and start learning basic vocabulary here. Japanese Vowels: Learn the pronunciation and how to write them in hiragana.

Japanese Verb Conjugations: See the conjugations for the most common verbs. Japanese Grammar: Learn the characteristics of how sentences are constructed. Japanese Writing Systems: An overview of the three writing systems. Greetings and Everyday Expressions: Useful for tourists.

First Meetings and Introductions: These tips will help in both business and social interactions. Simple Japanese Phrases: Learn a variety of simple phrases. There are three types of scripts in Japanese: kanji, hiragana and katakana. Japanese does not use an alphabet and all three systems are commonly used. Kanji has blocks of meaning and thousands of characters. Hiragana expresses the grammatical relationship between kanji symbols and katakana is used for foreign names.

Japanese Writing for Beginners – Introduction to Japanese writing and understanding how kanji, hiragana, and katakana are used. Kanji – 100 Most Frequent Characters: With thousands of different characters, these are the meanings of the top 100. Familiarizing yourself with the sounds and rhythms of the language is a good place to start. Audio and video lessons can help. Hearing someone speak in Japanese and being able to answer appropriately is very rewarding for the beginner.