12 CHAPTER 1. THE SYNTAX
a different phonetic system.
The best advice with regards to this is to simply listen to a lot of
Japanese. It takes time and effort to unlearn the unconscious mapping your
brain does for you. You’re going to get it wrong, but as long as you know
you are, you’ll be on the right track.
1.1.4 The difference between hiragana and katakana
If hiragana and katakana sound exactly the same, why then are there two
different scripts?
When Japanese first developed a wriĴen system, it was based on
the characters used in China for the Chinese language, in which for the
most part the meaning of the characters were subservient to what they
sounded like: if a word had an ”a” sound in it, then any Chinese charac-
ter that sounded like ”a” could be used for it, without any real regard for
its meaning. This ”using certain characters for their sound only” became
more widespread as the number of characters per syllable dropped from
quite many to only a handful, and as writing became more widespread two
syllablic scripts developed. One, which simplified phonetic kanji by omit-
ting parts of them lead to what is today called katakana. Another, which
simplified phonetic kanji by further and further reducing the complexity
of the cursive forms for these kanji, has become what is known today as
hiragana.
These two scripts have differed in roles throughout history, and in
modern Japanese hiragana is used for anything Japanese that does not use
(or need) kanji, and katakana is used in the same way that we use italics
in western language, as well as for words that have been imported into
Japanese from other languages over the course of history. The only gen-
uine difference between the two scripts is the way in which long vowel
sounds are wriĴen, as we shall see in the next section.
1.2 Writing spoken japanese
Using the kana as basic building blocks, Japanese pronunciation consists of
a few more things beyond basic syllables: in addition to ”simple” syllable
sounds, it contains long vowels, glides and double consonants.
Long vowels, contrary to the name, do not always mean ”the same
vowel, twice as long”. Strictly speaking, a long vowel in Japanese is a com-
bination of two vowels, pronounced over two ”drum beats”. In katakana,
long vowels are really just that, a vowel with a dash to indicate the sound