Learn Japanese with These Great English to Japanese Digital Tools
Japanese is ranked by the US Foreign Service Institute as one of the hardest languages to learn for English speakers. The difficulty in going from English to Japanese (or vice versa) probably lies in the huge disparities between the two languages:
- The Japanese alphabet is fairly complicated, consisting of hiragana (a phonetic lettering system), katakana (the alphabet used mainly for imported words), and kanji (the Chinese characters that have been adopted into the Japanese language).
- Japanese is a pitch-accent language, meaning that the same word can have different meanings depending on the tone or pitch of a particular syllable. A classic example is ha-shi (chopsticks) or ha-shi (bridge), where the highlighted syllable in bold has a higher pitch than the rest of the word. [For more on pitch accents, we have included an excellent introductory video at the end of this article.]
So, is Japanese Really Hard to Learn?
At Japan Nakama, we are strongly of the belief that Japanese is not as hard to learn as you think. We’ve recently posted our very own beginner’s guide to learning Japanese, and many other resources also exist to help the beginner learner.
In this article, we are not looking to replace those resources, but aim to provide a list of supplementary tools that help you learn and use Japanese more naturally. These can be used when you just want a quick search whilst…