Hiragana

Hiragana, the main alphabet of Japanese. Hiragana is the phonetic writing system used for writing Japanese words and the pronunciation of kanji.

These are the 46 basic characters. Japanese characters are arranged in syllables and the chart is read using a grid of consonants and vowels. For example, か is pronounced 'ka' and ろ is pronounced 'ro'.

There are a few special cases to this. First, we have the only single consonant in the Japanese language, 'n'.

Next we have the irregular sounds, 'shi', 'chi', 'tsu', 'fu' and 'o'.

Once you've grasped those those characters, I'll introduce you to the inflected characters. These guys are small changed at are made to existing characters to make a new sound. We have the dakuten " and the handaku °. The dakuten can be added to the K, S, T and H lines and the handaku can only be added to the H line.

Dakuten:

There are a couple of irregular sounds in the Dakuten line as well. These are 'ji', 'dzi' and 'dzu'.

Handaku:

Next we have blended sounds, these are made by combining the I line with the Y line.

This gives us another 38 sounds to work with... It's a lot, I know. Blended sounds are written using a normal sized I character and a small Y character.

And, with that... Congratulations! You've learned all 109 Hiragana and are well on your way to learning Japanese.

Up next: Katakana and Writing Japanese.