Lesson 4 · Vocabulary

Eighty words, two letters each

The forty-six characters are readable. That is not the same as reading. This lesson turns them on real words — eighty of them, every one exactly two kana long, every kana drawn from the forty-six you already have.

≈15 minutes, most of it drilling · every reading and gloss checked against Jisho.org

Fifty of the eighty have already walked past you as example words in lessons 1 to 3. They were props then — something for a character to sit inside. Here they are the point.

1.Two beats, not two letters

Before the words, the thing that makes them sound Japanese.

Each kana is one mora: one beat, and every beat gets the same length. A two-kana word is therefore two beats, evenly spaced, with neither one leaning on the other. Nothing is stressed, nothing is swallowed.

This is where beginner pronunciation goes wrong, because English does the opposite — it picks a syllable to stress and squeezes whatever is left.

ん is a beat of its own. ほん is ho-n, held as long as みみ or にく — not the single syllable an English ear hears in "hone". It is the one kana that is not a consonant plus a vowel, and it is the one most often robbed of its time.

So read every word below in two. Tap the speaker if a rhythm will not settle; the synthesised voice is imperfect on pitch but the timing is right.

2.The words, by meaning

Nine groups. Grouping by meaning rather than by first character is deliberate: you will want やま when you are talking about a mountain, not when you are working through the や row.

Each card gives the word in kana, its romaji, its English sense, and the Arabic — Modern Standard, fully vowelled — with a play button for each language. Read the kana first and use the romaji only to check yourself.

A card that says "also means…" is not a warning — it is the ordinary state of a two-beat word. Section 4 explains why there are so many.

3.Read them for meaning

Lesson 3 drilled shape to sound. This drill assumes the sound and asks for the meaning, which is the part that makes a word a word. It runs in three directions, and they are not equally hard:

• かな → English — reading. You will be best at this.
• English → かな — production. Much harder, and much more useful: this is the direction speaking needs.
• かな → العربية — the same word, straight into Arabic, with no English in between.

The three wrong answers are drawn from the same meaning group as the right one. Offered "mountain, cat, to buy, chair" against うみ, anyone could pick the right one without knowing the word; offered "mountain, river, sky, forest", you either know it or you do not. Answer by tapping or by pressing 1–4. Pick a single group from the menu when eighty in a row is too many.

A correct answer moves on by itself. A wrong one stops and shows you the whole card — kana, romaji, English, Arabic, both play buttons — because a multiple-choice question that leaves a wrong answer standing will happily teach you the wrong answer.

One pass through a group, then the misses again, is a session. Do not sit there re-running it to a clean round; a clean round twenty minutes after a dirty one proves very little. Come back tomorrow and switch the direction — the words you can read are not yet the words you can produce.

4.When two words share a spelling

Six of the eighty carry a note saying they also mean something else. That is not bad luck in the selection. Japanese has a small inventory of sounds and an enormous number of two-beat words, so collisions are unavoidable — and the commonest words collide most, because they have been in the language longest.

Two things pull them apart, and neither is your job yet.

In speech, pitch. はし meaning chopsticks starts high and drops; はし meaning bridge does the opposite. Japanese pitch accent is real, it is regional, and it is a later problem — say the beats evenly and let context carry the rest, which is what it does for the many pairs pitch does not separate either.

In writing, the characters. Written out properly these are not the same word on the page at all: rain and sweets are 雨 and 飴, nose and flower are 鼻 and 花. Those are kanji, and there is nothing to learn about them here — only the reassurance that the ambiguity you are looking at is an artefact of writing everything in kana, and that Japanese itself is not as ambiguous as this page makes it look.

Meanwhile, treat the collisions as free vocabulary. Learning that くも is a cloud has already taught you the word for spider.

5.What eighty words buys you

Not sentences — those need particles and verb endings that have not been taught. What it buys is the thing that comes before sentences: enough words in the head that a real one, met in the wild, is mostly known rather than mostly unknown.

It also buys eighty pieces of Arabic on the same hook. That is the whole arrangement of this course — one set of meanings, reached from two directions — and it is at its cheapest here, where each meaning is a single concrete noun with one obvious translation. It gets more expensive later.