“Akihabara: Akihabara is best-known as one of the largest shopping areas on Earth for electronic, anime, and otaku goods, including new and used items.”
Lesson Six: Kana 1
I can just hear you asking, “Haruka, I thought Japanese had funny symbols for words. Why are we learning Japanese without those symbols?” Don’t worry, we’re going to start learning them now!
Before we can really learn Japanese we need to be able to use kana. Kana refers to both hiragana and katakana, which are two of the writing systems that are used in Japanese. The other system is kanji. It’s more complicated than the other two, so we’ll come back to that later. For now, we’re going to start learning hiragana since it’s the default writing system for Japanese.
Here are the first five characters. Be sure to use the Speak and Write functions below. The letters on this page are the vowels. The vowels are always in this order. Also, unlike English, the vowels will always sound the same!
a | あ |
i | い |
u | う |
e | え |
o | お |
Here, each character starts with k and is followed by one of the vowels. This pattern is followed by most hiragana. Don’t forget to see how they are written. The WAY that you write something is much more important in Japanese than it is in English.
ka | か |
ki | き |
ku | く |
ke | け |
ko | こ |
Let’s get some practice writing these out. Ganbatte!
GAME: Fading characters
As you learn more hiragana, you’ll be able to stop writing in English letters. You’ll be that much closer to really knowing Japanese! Here are a few words that you can write already! Give them a try.
blue | aoi | あおい |
no | iie | いいえ |
Great! These words used characters from both sets. Test out your memory!
hill | oka | おか |
go | iku | いく |
If we only had the 46 hiragana characters to choose from, Japanese wouldn’t have many ways to pronounce words. But adding more characters isn’t a very good solution. Instead, we can place little symbols next to a character to show that it is read differently. The symbol I’m going to talk about this time is the dakuten (also called a tenten).
The dakuten looks like quotation marks. It’s placed in the top right corner of a character. Not all characters can use a dakuten.
All “k” character can use a dakuten. Putting a dakuten on them gives them a g sound instead of a k sound.
ga | が |
gi | ぎ |
gu | ぐ |
ge | げ |
go | ご |
Let’s really get these practiced! I’ve got a new game for you!
GAME: Write cards
Many people new to Japanese think that each character is a word, but hiragana and katakana only represent sounds. They don’t mean anymore than the letters of the English alphabet do.
Go ahead and practice these some more, and I’ll get more hiragana characters ready for you to study. Next time we’ll cover the months!
