First Lesson: Hiragana

Well, Japanese is not that hard as everybody thinks, but there is something hard: learn to read it.

First you may know that there are two different alphabets: hiragana and katakana. Hiragana is the alphabet used for writing almost everything, actually you can write it all in hiragana and people will understand. Katakana is the alphabet for foreign words, for example the name 'Mary'.

In addition there are kanji also. Kanji is the set of chinese characters, those symbols we see but do not mean a thing. A group of Kanji can represent a word and that is the difficult part. But now, let us focus only in learning Hiragana.

Japanese people do not write a letter as we do, they write syllables. So you have 10 groups of syllables organized in a table as follows:

A,     KA, SA,   TA,    NA,  MA,  HA,    RA,   YA,   WA

あ、か、 さ、 た、 な、ま、 は、 ら、や、 わ

For example, In the "KA" group you will find the syllables KA, KI, KU, KE, KO (か、き、く、け、こ) and in the "NA" group you will find the syllables NA, NI, NU, NE NO (な、 に、ぬ、ね、の) and so on.

Here is the complete chart:

ら

RA

は

HA

ま

MA

な

NA

た

TA

さ

SA

か

KA

あ

A

り

RI

ひ

HI

み

MI

に

NI

ち

CHI

し

SHI

き

KI

い

I

る

RU

ふ

FU

む

MU

ぬ

NU

つ

TSU

す

SU

く

KU

う

U

れ

RE

へ

HE

め

ME

ね

NE

て

TE

せ

SE

け

KE

え

E

ろ

RO

ほ

HO

も

MO

の

NO

と

TO

そ

SO

こ

KO

お

O

わ

WA

や

YA

を

WO

ゆ

YU

ン

N

よ

YO

For those who know Spanish the pronounciation remains the same, nevertheless for those who speak english the pronounciation may vary. Here is the link where you can listen the pronounciation and also practice!!! 

http://www.fuentejp.com/asobi/kikuhira/escucha-hira.html 

Oh! I almost forget! The way it is written does matter! Each trace must be done in a specific order, which is shown in this video:

Also, here is a good book to practice the traces: http://elearn.toplanguage.co.jp/file/hiragana.pdf

Ok that's all. I hope you can learn a lot!

I would love to read your commentaries. Bye.