Lesson Seventeen: Kana 5
Are you ready to finish your hiragana training? This lesson covers the lasts of the hiragana. I hope you’ve been practicing. If you can’t read and write hiragana at the end of this lesson you should review it. When you reach lesson 30, the focus is on real Japanese rather than romaji! Be ready for it!
There are only six more characters left of hiragana so I’m also going to start you on katakana in this lesson. There is a katakana character for every hiragana character.
Here are the Y and W characters. Notice there is no “yi” or “ye.”
ya | や |
yu | ゆ |
yo | よ |
wa | わ |
wo | を |
The last hiragana character is the singular ん (n) character. It’s the only character without a vowel.
n | ん |
The Y characters are special. They can be put with other characters to make other sounds. In oder to do that, they need to be drawn smaller than usual. They also need to be right after another character that ends with “i.”
Here are some examples of using the small Y characters.
kya | きゃ |
cho | ちょ |
Before moving on to katakana there is something else that should be mentioned. The small つ (tsu) character. The small つ (tsu) character can be used to hold out a consonant sound. When writing in romaji the consonant is written twice.
itta | いった |
kekka | けっか |
Now let’s start on katakana! Katakana is mostly used for foreigh words, like America and anime. Anime is short for animation.
Here are the vowels in katakana. You’ll notice that katakana is much more angular than hiragana.
a | ア |
i | イ |
u | ウ |
e | エ |
o | オ |
Okay! Time to test them out!
GAME: Fading characters
Remember, you should be ready to write all words in hiragana by now. Try to write more words in hiragana, it will really help your practice!
On that note, it’s time to get some practice in!
GAME: Write cards
Next time let’s cover some greeting. Greetings are always useful.
