You are probably wondering how that can be done as Japanese is considered to be the hardest language in the world along with Chinese! Well I had the same view until I got over my fear and decided to look into it! But I also had some encouragement. In between my English tutorials, I decided to take up some Japanese conversation classes. There are lots of places in Tokyo that give conversation classes for nominal fees! And after my first lesson, my first homework was to learn Japanese characters!   

Japanese uses 3 different writing scripts - Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. Although they are historically related, for someone learning to read and write Japanese, it is like learning 3 different scripts as different as English, Russian and Arabic! I picked those scripts for comparison, as they give the best analogy - because they are also meant to be historically related and have similarities - Very hard to see the similarities when trying to learning them! And that is one of the main reasons why Japanese is difficult to learn!

Hiragana and Katakana are the scripts we are dealing with when talking about learning to read and write in 3 days! But not Kanji! That takes a long time! Kanji is the more intricate oriental script commonly shared with Chinese, which takes school kids the entire duration of their school days to learn the complete set.   

Due to historical reasons, some Japanese words are written in Hiragana and some in Katakana while others are written in Kanji. If you look at any Japanese publications, any of the sentences can contain a mix of the three scripts. For example, this says 'My name is Fred':   私 の 名前 はフレッドです. The first, second, fourth and fifth characters are in kanji. The remaining are a mix of Hiragana and Katakana.   

So what use is it learning only 2 out of the 3 scripts, I hear you say! There are a lot of everyday things written only in Hiragana or Katakana that you can start to read after just 3 days of learning with my newly designed intensive course! Things like Road names, Shops, Restaurant names, Restaurant Menus, Hotels, Train stations, TV ads etc can be written in Hiragana or Katakana - You can also use Hiragana or Katakana scripts to write everything you want to communicate without having to use Kanji and that would be perfectly acceptable and legible!   

There are loads of online courses and some apps that even charge you money to train you to read and write these scripts. But my intensive course is completely free! Now that I have convinced you on how useful these scripts are, let's get started!  

First in is Hiragana (http://realkana.com/hiragana/). It has 75 characters. The first 50 are the difficult ones. The remaining 25 only have slight variations. Once you memorise the first 50 the rest are easy! It took me 2 days to memorise the first 50 characters and 20 mins for the remaining 25! I have to say that was 2 very long days!   

After spending the third day endlessly testing myself for proficiency, it was time for my road test! On my way back to my next Japanese lesson, I was testing myself on the train using train-station names as they are written in Hiragana (as well as in Kanji). When the next station name was announced on the train's pa system, I was writing it down in Hiragana and checking if it was correct when the train got to the stop. There was no need to pay for fancy apps to test myself! I managed to get 8 station names out of 11 correct, which was not bad for 3 days of work?!   

Once Hiragana was in the bag, next was Katakana (http://realkana.com/katakana/). Katakana has the same number of characters as Hiragana - 75 in total.  With my new found confidence, it took me a day to memorise them. Even if you were not as keen as I was, it shouldn't take that much longer.   

Japanese is certainly a very difficult language to learn but I did not expect it to be this easy to get started with. The next step is going to be slow as I will have to learn the meaning of the words, the grammar and Kanji! But sometimes the sentences I read are all written solely in Hiragana and Katakana. And with the words I have already learnt, I can understand their meaning. But if the sentences have a single kanji character, I get completely stuck!   

If I can read and write these scripts in 3 days, I would encourage anyone to give it a go, even if you are only planning to visit Japan as a tourist. The knowledge will some day come handy when trying to find a road, a shop or a hotel dragging your luggage and you may find it was not written in English. Plus it's always fun learning another language as it's like having a new window to a new culture and seeing the world from a different perspective.   

Looking forward to my next kanji lesson and wishing you a great start to the week! そして、あけましておめでとう!