Hiragana

Japanese is written with three scripts at the same time, and hiragana is the one that holds a sentence together. There are forty-six characters, they are entirely regular, and a fortnight of ten minutes a day is enough to learn them cold. The goal of this lesson is not to recognise them when prompted, which is easy, but to read and write all forty-six from memory, which is the thing every later lesson quietly assumes you can do.

Why hiragana comes first

The three scripts divide the labour. Hiragana is a syllabary: each character stands for a sound, not a meaning. It carries the grammar of the language, the verb endings and the small words that mark who did what to whom. Katakana is a second syllabary covering exactly the same sounds, used mostly for words borrowed from other languages, and it is the next lesson. Kanji are the characters borrowed from Chinese, which carry meaning as well as sound, and they arrive properly in lesson nine.

A normal sentence mixes all three, but hiragana is the mortar between the bricks. Strip the kanji out of a text and it merely looks childish. Strip the hiragana out and it stops being Japanese at all. Learners who put this off and lean on romanised Japanese pay twice over: they read at a crawl for years afterwards, and they mispronounce, because the Latin alphabet keeps suggesting English sounds that Japanese does not contain.

The gojūon grid

Hiragana is not an alphabet in a line but a grid, the gojūon or "fifty sounds". Read across for the five vowels, always in the order a, i, u, e, o. Read down for consonant families: everything in the second row starts with k, everything in the third with s. Each character is one consonant plus one vowel, with two kinds of exception: the five bare vowels along the top, and ん at the foot, which is a lone n.

Learn it in grid order, one row a day. That order is not merely traditional: it is the order of every dictionary, every index, every class register and every menu you will ever read.

Four cells break the pattern in sound rather than in writing. し is shi, never si. ち is chi, never ti. つ is tsu, a t and an s pressed together, as at the end of "cats". ふ sits between an f and an h, blown between the lips rather than made with the teeth. The writing is perfectly regular here; it is the consonant that shifts before certain vowels.

Reading your first words

Nothing else is needed to read a real word. Sound out each character in turn, giving every one the same length, and you have it.

やま
yama
mountain

ねこ
neko
cat

さかな
sakana
fish

ひと
hito
person

Two strokes that change the sound

A pair of short strokes at the top right, the dakuten, voices the consonant. A small circle, the handakuten, turns the h row into p. No new shapes to learn, so twenty-five extra sounds cost nothing.

じ and ぢ sound identical, as do ず and づ. In modern spelling the し and す forms do almost all the work, and ぢ and づ turn up in a handful of words only, so treat them as curiosities rather than as choices you have to make.

かぎ
kagi
key

でんわ
denwa
telephone

たべもの
tabemono
food

かばん
kaban
bag

Small ya, yu and yo

Written full size, や ゆ よ are ordinary characters. Written small after a character from the i column, they fuse with it into a single sound: き plus small ゃ is kya, one beat, not two. These are the yōon.

おちゃ
ocha
tea

しゃしん
shashin
photograph

じてんしゃ
jitensha
bicycle

きんぎょ
kingyo
goldfish

Three characters that misbehave

は and へ are read exactly as the chart says inside a word, but each has a second job as a grammatical particle, and in that job it changes. は as a particle is read wa, and へ as a particle is read e. を is stranger still: it is read o, identical to お, and it survives for one grammatical purpose only, so it never turns up inside an ordinary word. Lessons four and six put all three to work. For now simply note that はな is hana, while a lone は standing between two words is wa.

ん has its own quirk: no Japanese word begins with it. That is why the word game shiritori, where each player must start from the last character of the previous word, ends the moment somebody says a word finishing in ん.

What learners get wrong

Almost all early mistakes are pairs of characters that look alike, so learn each pair as a pair rather than meeting the second one by surprise. The worst offenders are ぬ and め, which differ only by the loop at the tail; ね, れ and わ, which share a left-hand upright; る and ろ, again a loop; は and ほ; き and さ; and い beside り.

The second common mistake is treating stroke order as decoration. It is not: correct order is what makes handwriting legible at speed, and it is how you look up a character you cannot yet name. Write with a pencil, slowly, in the order shown on any stroke chart, and the shapes stick in your hand as well as in your eye.

The third is drifting towards English vowels. Japanese has five, and they are pure and short: あ as in "father" but clipped, い as in "machine", う with the lips relaxed rather than rounded, え as in "bed", お as in "for". None of them glides into a second vowel the way English "no" and "day" do.

How to learn them in a week

Take one row a day, five characters, and write each one twenty times while saying it aloud. At the end of the day, cover the chart and write the whole row from the romanised prompts. On day two, do the new row and yesterday's from memory. By day ten you have covered the grid twice.

Then stop drilling characters alone and start reading words. Every word in the vocabulary below, and every example above, is written entirely in hiragana, so nothing is beyond you. Reading real words is what converts slow recall into fluent recognition, and it is the only part of this that transfers to actually reading Japanese.

Vocabulary