Japanese for Aikidoka

合気道の日本語

Aikido is a Japanese martial art, so we use Japanese terms for exercises and techniques.

We also count in Japanese.

Count from 0 to 10

In Aikido we count
1 ichi - 2 ni - 3 san - 4 shi - 5 go - 6 roku - 7 shichi - 8 hachi - 9 ku - 10 ju

Repetition

Attention: the consonants are pronounced as in English, the vowels as in Italian.

Count with your fingers

Counting in Japanese the fingers are closed.

Japanese writing is made up of three components:

the Kanji, the Hiragana and the Katakana.
Hiragana and Katakana are two phonetic syllabic alphabets.
Katakana is commonly used to transcribe words of non-Japanese origin, for the scientific names of plants and animals, for the transcription of sounds and to emphasize some words.
Hiragana is used for everything else, such as the conjugation of verbs and the suffixes of words.
The kanji are the most complex part of Japanese writing, they originate from China and are several thousand of which around 1800 are the most commonly used.
In addition to these three systems of writing there is a fourth, rōmaji, which literally means "Roman characters".

  • Katakana (カタカナ)
    マルコ (maruko) Marco
    ニナ (nina) Nina
    ルカ (ruka) Luca
    リサ (risa) Lisa
    ロレンゾ (rorenzo) Lorenzo
    スイス (suisu) Switzerland
    イタリア (itaria) Italy
  • Hiragana (ひらがな)
    にほんこく (nihonkoku) Japan
    き (ki) tree
    はやし (hayashi) forest
  • Kanji (漢字) are Japanese words written with Chinese signs (characters). About 1500 years ago the Japanese adopted these characters from the Chinese to write the Japanese language and later developed it further.
    日本国 (nihonkoku) Japan
    木 (ki) tree
    林 (hayashi) forest
  • Rōmaji (Latin alphabet)
    CO2, 737MAX, TOKYO2020

Further explanations can be found at toitsu.de