2020-11-17 20:47
How to use the Chinese course
2020-11-17 20:47
General
Japanese
How to use the Japanese course
If you want to read and write Japanese, at the bottom of your session screen, turn on Full Practice mode. There is a Typing Guide below the typing box. This typing guide shows you how to type on a Japanese keyboard to produce the hiragana and katakana.
If you want to practice speaking and listening, then turn on Listening Mode, and I strongly recommending turning on the "Recording" button as well! You'll get to see more detailed phonics in this mode for pronouncing Japanese properly.
Glossika offers transcriptions for all languages written in different scripts:
● Typing Guide (appears under the typing box): this adheres closely to actual spelling rules, and teaches you how to type in native scripts. You'll notice that there are multiple methods for typing syllables like "tsu" and "chi" and other similar syllables, so we offer two transcriptions for Japanese as default. Feel free to turn on your Japanese keyboard when you're confident enough, and start typing in Japanese anytime you want. You'll get a drop-down menu to choose kanji as well (I'll go into more detail about Kanji below). Our character recognition for Japanese is a "fuzzy match" algorithm, which means that many letters have multiple spellings and characters that are possible. You may enter your answers with any level of Kanji, hiragana, or romanization. If a word requires katakana, then enter katakana only, or romanization.
● Characters: this transcription changes all hiragana possible in the sentence into any Kanji that may exist for those words, including rare kanji. None of the kanji in this transcription have pronunciation guides.
● Furigana: this transcription is the same as the Character transcription, showing all known Kanji in the sentence, but it also has ruby text, or small pronunciation characters in hiragana above each of the kanji.
● Pronunciation Guide (toggle on and off in listening and recording modes): the pronunciation guide is an easier to read version how to pronounce each word accurately. This is essentially a standard romanization of Japanese.
● Phonics Guide (toggle on and off in listening and recording modes): phonics is written in international phonetic alphabet (IPA), and for you linguists, Glossika IPA is always a "phonetic" spelling showing the allophones. What this means is some sounds change in special environments. This guide shows you the way a native speaker actually pronounces each word in detail.
Japanese has pitch accent, so it's important to mimic the native speakers as best as possible. We currently do not support pitch accent in our transcriptions.
Kanji Levels:
The Japanese government publishes and tests the learning of Kanji (常用漢字/じょうようかんじ) on a scale of difficulty. All levels on Glossika (A1, A2, B1, B2, etc) are split into two levels: low and high. Each of these levels corresponds to a Kanji level, and we display the kanji for the level that you're at. However, you can always turn on Kanji at any time using transcriptions.
We post regular updates in notifications here on updates to Japanese.
