Hi everyone. Hope you had a great holiday with your family. We are now starting a beginning of the new year! Let’s get learning more about Japanese.  This month, along with topics such as, culture, cuisine, music, travel, and holidays, I will be introducing you to reading aspect of Japanese. By learning the writing styles, you will be able to read & write more in Japanese.  You will be building your vocabularies as well for sure!

As you might know already, in Japanese, there are 3 different symbols available. The basic one that you need to learn first is Hiragana (ひらがな), and the next style is called Katakana (かたかな), and lastly, we have Kanji (漢字), which is very similar to Chinese characters.

Hiragana (ひらがな) & Katakana (かたかな) are used to represent one syllable, and they do not have much meaning other than the representation of sound. The important thing to know here is that Katakana (かたかな) is used to represent the word that is foreign origin. Many of the English words are expressed in Katakana (かたかな). Once you know more about each symbols, you will be able to mix Hiragana (ひらがな), Katakana (かたかな), and Kanji (漢字) within each sentence.

So, with that said, let’s start learning Hiragana (ひらがな) first.  I will cover Katakana (かたかな), and Kanji (漢字) in later articles.

Here is the chart that shows Japanese Hiragana (ひらがな).  These are the basic 48 Hiragana’s. (ひらがな) However, these days we normally do not use ゐ & ゑ below under w~.

Photo from Wikipedia.com

Let’s practice some of the words below.  See if you can read these based on the chart above.

いす

ふね

つくえ

そと

つき

かい

あたま

とり

いわ

いし

かめ

You will be reading each word like this:

いす(isu) – chair

ふね(fune) – ship

つくえ(tsukue) – desk

そと (soto) -outside

つき(tsuki) – moon

かい(kai) -shell

あたま(atama)-head

とり(tori)-bird

いわ(iwa)-rock

いし(ishi)-stone

かめ(kame)-turtle

Lastly, here is a cute video for your Hiragana review!

Enjoy learning, and feel free to leave me your comments.  You can try some of the Hiragana in your comments as well if you wish.