biondr.blogg.se - Japanese letters

There aren't characters for "yi", "ye", or "wu". Some people wonder why "yi", "ye", "wi", "wu", and "we" are missing. I will let you know whenever we come upon a word in which they are used. Since they are used so rarely I wouldn't worry about them too much. The same applies for the Hiragana ぢ (ji). づ (zu) only occurs when there is a つ (tsu) in front of it like in つづく (tsuzuku - to continue) or when a Kanji (Chinese character) that has a reading which starts with つ (tsu) is paired at the end with another character changing the つ (tsu) to a づ (zu). The characters づ (zu) and ぢ (ji) are very rarely used. Note: You probably noticed in the chart above that there are 2 characters pronounced "zu" and 2 characters pronounced "ji". They finally ended up taking sounds slightly different then the hiragana was normally pronounced which were also sounds already found in the Japanese language so these two exceptions are often very confusing to outsiders.

The sound for the "ha", "hi", "fu", "he", "ho" evolved one way and the particles, which sounded closer to "wa" and "we", went a different route. In the classic Japanese language the "h" sound was pronounced like "w", "h", and "f" all put together.

The Hiragana へ (he) is pronounced "e" when it immediately follows a place or direction.

This character is usually only pronounced "ha" when it is part of a word.

The Hiragana は (ha) is pronounced "wa" when it immediately follows the topic of the sentence.

Here is a Printable Hiragana Chart (PDF - get Adobe Acrobat Reader). It is slightly "rolled" as if it were a combination of a "d", "r", and "l". The only "consonant" that does not resemble that of English is the Japanese "r". Katakana will be covered in Lesson 2.ĭon't wait to move on until you have all Hiragana characters memorized - learn them as you continue to go through the other lessons.Īll Hiragana characters end with one of these vowels, with the exception of (n). Japanese also consists of two other character sets - Kanji (Chinese characters), which we will get into later, and another alphabet/character set, Katakana, which is mainly used for foreign words. Hiragana is the main alphabet or character set for Japanese. The characters in the chart below are called Hiragana. The Japanese alphabet does not contain letters but, instead, contains characters and, technically, they are not an alphabet but a character set. There are absolutely no "tones" in Japanese like in many other Asian languages, and there are only 2 exceptions within the alphabet which will be explained later.

Or, at least, to learn the sounds that exist in the language. The first step to learning the Japanese language is to learn the alphabet. 🔊 Want audio on this lesson? Register for our members area and get audio for Hiragana - The Japanese Alphabet.