Beginning vocabulary, greetings

Ok so time to introduce some vocab, with any luck with a bit of practice you can now read some hiragana at least. I will post a few words that you can learn in both Hiragana and Romaji, the romaji is attempted to be for pronounciation so might not reflect exactly whats written in hiragana. I suggest avoiding the romaji as soon as you can though, so learn those kana!

すごい - Sugoi this means something like cool or similar. So when someone does something cool you say すごい !

くわいい　- kuwaii - this means cute, although in Japan apparently lots of things are cute, not just bunny rabbits ;) So an example would be my daughter is very くわいい

So a couple of useful words to start off with, you can use these as both questions in a relaxed informal way with friends and likewise answers. Such as a friend comes around and loads up a preview video of a new game and turns to you and asks
"すごい?" You just answer
"すごい!"

Ok next up a few greetings and killing a quick common misconception about hello.
Firstly Japanese has a couple of greetings based on time of the day, the common phrase most people know is
こんいちは　- konnichiwa this is not just hello, it is more like good day.
So used typically from 9/10am until evening, for some reason everyone thinks this is just a general hello and you would get some interesting looks if you used this at 11pm for example!

For good morning (used until 9/10amish where it swaps to the above) it is
おはよございます　- which is ohayogozaimasu This is quite formal, for a relaxed greeting between friends of relatives you can drop the
ございます - gozaimasu and just have
おはよ - ohayo.
An exmaple of this in english would be rather than "Good Morning" you say to a friend "Morning"

Onto evening time (from 4/5pmish) and we come to
こんばんは - Kombanwa

Finally we have Good Night and this is typically just before bed rather than a goodbye like it can get used in Britain. Therefore usually used only between family etc. This is
おやすみなさい　oyasuminasai

So to recap we have morning, day, evening, night.

おはよございます

こんいちは

こんばんは

おやすみなさい

This shows a few parting gestures too, I will expand on these in my next blog so don't panic on them right now because they are perhaps not just the bye stated on this video.