There are five vowels in the Japanese language (similar to English). The sounds are::

• "a" that sounds like AH as in Father
• "i" that sounds like EE as in Week
• "u" that sounds like OO as in Google
• "e" that sounds like AY as in Day
• "o" that sounds like OH as in Nose

When words have two vowels together each vowel should be pronounced by itself, such as in the word "いえ" (which means house）it is pronounced "ee-ay". When two of the same vowels are together then you hold the sound longer. For example in the word "いいえ" (which means no) the "ee" sound is held longer, where as in the word"いえ" both sounds have the same length.

The vowel sound "う" (oo) is a multipurpose vowel! Most of the time it is pronounced very quietly or not at all as in the words "です" (day-soo) and "ます" (ma-soo) which usually sound like "dess" and "mass". But sometimes the "oo" sound can be exagerated as most people in Osaka will greet you with a hardy "ohayo gozaimasu" heavy on the OO!

There are three writtens forms of Japanese; Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. The first two alphabets are collectively known as "kana". There is also a romanized (Romaji) version (Japanese written with the English alphabet), which you will see in all of my articles as it is helpful for pronunciation purposes while you are learning but you will not find romaji used in Japan hardly at all. So if you are planning on moving to Japan and want a head start then keep reading!

Hiragana is the basic alphabet with 55 characters to represent all of the sounds. It is quite simple in it’s writing and is syllabic which means you can sound out the words once you know the characters. For example: hi-ra-ga-na (ひらがな）