ABC's

So I've decided to try to learn some Japanese. To be honest, all of those "character" languages have kind of scared me as a roman alphabet user, but apparently the Japanese have sort of combined the best of both worlds. Although they do use some pictograms, where one character basically means an entire word, for the most part their language is syllabic with syllagrams for the limited number of syllables in their language. According to the book I'm reading there are about 110 basic sounds in Japanese, versus about 8000 in English, which also makes things a lot easier to wrap your head around.

The characters at the top of this post represent the basic vowel sounds, and also my attempt to start learning the hiragana character set. This is the equivalent of a little kid learning how to print, and is a humbling experience. It's on to the consonantish sounds tomorrow and trying to imprint the strokes into my brain.