3.1 - Hiragana

Hiragana really is just the ABCs of Japanese. The only difference is that each hiragana character has a sound made up of 2 alphabets unlike English which has 1 character for each alphabet:

Z - zee (one syllable in English alphabets)
za - (two syllables in Hiragana character-set)

The five vowels of Japanese (written in hiragana) are:

a - あ
i - い
u - う
e - え
o - お

Albeit similar to English, these vowels are pronounced a little differently which is beyond the scope of this lesson to explain due to the need of actual sounds to understand it.

The rest of the characters, that are not the vowels, i.e. the consonants, are based on these five vowels as all of them borrow the sounds from these vowels. For example:

a - あ   -->  ka - か
i - い    -->  ki - き
u - う   -->  ku - く
e - え   -->  ke - け
o - お   -->  ko - こ

Do you see how the ka-series of characters use the same vowels after the "k" sound? This can be applied to all other consonants as well. Now, you are prepared to learn the Hiragana chart - a chart containing all the Hiragana alphabets. The chart is given below:

The chart is to be read from left to right, and each column is each alphabet's series of characters. The first five are the vowels a, i, u, e, o. The next line is the ka-series: ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, and so on.

You might be confused as to what are those double-dashes and the little circles in the top-right corners of the characters on the right:

You can see that the ga-series is merely just the ka-series characters with two double-dashes added on their top-right. These double-dashes are known as "dakuten" and change the sounds of some characters. For instance: [ka + dakuten = ga] [sa + dakuten = za] [ta + dakuten = da] [ ha + dakuten = ba]

Now what are those little circles in the "pa"-series of characters? They are pretty similar to dakuten and are known as "handakuten". Like dakuten, handakuten also changes the pronunciation of characters. The only series of characters where a handakuten is used is the "pa pi pu pe po" series. [ha + handakuten = pa]


Lastly, ya, yu and yo can be combined with certain characters for complex sounds:
like [ki + ya = kya] [ri + yo = ryo]

This is all of Hiragana, quite literally. Now the only thing left is practice on your side. Hope you learnt something new from this lesson! Mata ashita!