Ultimate guide to learning hiragana
Learning Hiragana is the foundation to Japanese, It can not be encouraged enough, that this is the first step you take.
At ichigo we try our hardest to steer away from Romaji. Once Hiragana is mastered, which by the way will not take you long. You may find it hard to go back to Romaji.
So where to start?
We need to get you to be able to read and pronounce hiragana straight away.
Fortunately Japanese is a syllable based language, each character has its own sound so what you see is what you get. Unlike the English language, take the letter C for example, it has a hard and a soft sound like in the words Coffee and Civil.
Furthermore it's foundation is structured from 5 vowels (A I U E O), which you'll see on the first row of our interactive hiragana chart. These 5 are the most important, as once you can pronounce these then you will be able to pronounce all the others with one simple rule.
However they are not pronounced in the same way as the English language vowels.
- A is pronounced like the "a" in the word "car"
- I is pronounced like the "i" in the word "igloo" or even like the "ee" in "feel"
- U is pronounced like a double "oo" like in food or even like the "ou" in "you"
- E is pronounced like the "e" in "egg"
- O is pronounced like the "o" in "ostrich"
Once you have learn 5 ensure to watch the video to help with pronunciation
After learning a set of five kana watch the videos to help you with understanding each sound as it is spoken, this will also help with your own pronunciation.
Writing is key to with remembering the hiragana even though you will not write much Japanese in your daily life due to smart phones. It does help to get a great understanding of the stroke orders. Plus it will then lead to learning grammar and vocabulary when you start writing down example sentences.
As mentioned, we are writing less and using smart phones more, to communicate in our daily lives. Having a Japanese keyboard option on your phone is great. It is easy to set up and you can switch between with just one button on the keyboard.
It will most definitely help with kana recollection, and even Kanji.
So that is the first five hiragana, the vowels. Now we are going to move on to the main body of the hiragana. There is a rule that we can stick to when learning the following hiragana. That is, you take the vowel and a constenant in front of it so like in the next five for example “a” becomes “ka” Then ”i” becomes “ki” and so on for the other three vowels. Then we move on to the S section then the T section and so on. Our guid breaks it down in to fives then you will get a video just like above.
there are four exceptions to the rule however. We will point them out as we go along, and it doesn’t make hiragana any harder to learn.
Next up is the R section. There is a little difference in the way the Japanese pronounce their “R” to the way we do. If you are reading any other implementations to say that “Ri“ in Japanese is like “Ri”ver. It really isn’t. Ra is not like Rapper either. The Japanese pronunciation for R is a mixture of R and L. Try to combine the two sounds together at the same time when you read these kana. You should be trying to make the R sound but with your tongue slightly touching the roof of your mouth just behind the teeth. Next best thing is to watch the video and listen to the pronunciation.
This sound is why some Japanese people who do not speak, or have just started learning English, find it hard to differentiate between our Rs and Ls
We will avoid putting sound descriptions for this section to avoid confusion but it is the same principle as the previous sets.