hiragana, what hast thou donest

hiragana
Originally uploaded by p1ckle.

tonight was our weekly nihongo lesson, and over the last week i've been practicing the first of the three Japanese scripts - hiragana. It's used for when there isn't a kanji for something, and is pretty tough to learn, in that there are loads of them to learn (117 if you count all the extensions to the 46 basic ones) so as you can imagine, i haven't exactly been able to internalise them all... about 35 of them are in the brain, and luckily most of them are modifiers to the basic ones. The ones in the picture are ta, chi, tsu, te, na ni nu ne no, well, you get the idea. But, it's a fun language to learn - there's a real sense of achievement in being able to decipher a sign even if it just says 'sushi', or 'kudasai'... and then there's about the same number again for Katakana (the one used for borrowed words like birru, teribee and the like). We're going to try a Kanji test in December, where we need to know 100 Kanji, but that's a whole other story. For now, i just want to read ingredients...