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Hiragana Chart |
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Hiragana was developed by simplifying some kanji characters. Hiragana characters are phonetic symbols. That is, each character represents a sound. There are 46 characters in hiragana as shown in the chart below. Click on each character below to hear how each one is pronounced. This chart is to be read top-to-bottom, right-to-left starting from あ followed by い, う, え, お, か, き, く, け, こ, etc. and ends with the last symbol ん. For now, ignore the grayed-out characters below.
The chart above also represents the "alphabetical" order of Japanese. Each character corresponds to a syllable. There are only five (5) vowels in Japanese (/a/, /i/, /u/, /e/ and /o/) shown in the rightmost column. We will postpone the keyboard typing in Japanese until the end of this lesson. Do not attempt to rewrite every hiragana character in romaji just to help you read. This will create romaji dependency, and it will only delay your acquisition of hiragana. The last character ん in the chart is considered a syllable by itself and NEVER occurs at the beginning of Japanese words. To write the sounds /na/, /ni/, /nu/, /ne/ and /no/, use な, に, ぬ, ね and の, respectively. Combining two characters like んあ is never pronounced as a single syllable な /na/.
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There are many good Youtube tutorials on hiragana like this one: No romaji (romanized Japanese) will be provided starting in the next lesson. Try to memorize the pronunciation of each hiragana. The sooner you learn hiragana by heart, the faster you can read and write.
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To help you memorize the shapes and sounds of hiragana, a picture-based mnemonic help is provided on a separate page later.
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