Video Transcript

YUU ASAKURA: I like to take a minute to explain about the Japanese writing system. So here, I wrote down my name in different letters and the first one is, of course, alphabet, Y-U-U, it's Yuu. And we call it Roman letters, which is just to explain the phonetic of the sound. So we don't usually use it as a Japanese writing. Okay, here is the Japanese writing. The first one, right here, Yuu, is called Hiragana. This is a primary Japanese writing. And here also, it's Yuu, it's called Katakana. And those are two are very phonetic, just the one letter represents each sound. And this is the primary one, and this is used for, let's say borrowed words or invented new words, or describe sounds, so this is secondary, okay? And in this one, we call it Kanji, it's borrowed from Chinese characters. So we use all the mixture of the 3 Japanese writing is consisted of. So, we're going to use this one for now, but further down in the lesson, we're might use these.