Tips To Help You When Learning Hiragana and Katakana

Learning Hiragana and Katakana is pretty simple, but there are a few little pain points I have noticed and I want to cover them here as well as how to overcome them (which mostly means just practicing more) and this should help your learning go a little smoother.

This is a really important part of the language, as it is the foundation of the foundations, so it’s worth ironing out these little issues and trying to master the characters as best as you can.  

A Quick Overview Of The Characters

Hopefully you have already started learning the Japanese letters, if you haven’t I’m not going to teach them to you and instead tell you to watch the Japanesepod101 videos that I mention in the Japanese Day Zero Lesson.

They are excellent and really all you need. The videos are an hour long, but just break it down into a couple of sessions over a week and you will quickly learn everything you need. They use visualisation methods to help you remember each character and it works really well.

You can also test yourself using The Tofugu’s test. This is also excellent and really can’t be beat. If you just hammer these two recourses you will be 99% of the way there and the tips I go through below will deal with any little problems you might have.   

Different Pronunciations

The Japanese sound system is pretty straightforward and consistent …but there are some little annoying nuances that you are going to struggle with.

This is mostly the letters は and を. They are pronounced one way as letters …and a different way when they are used as a sentence particle.

は Is pronounced “ha” when it’s a letter and “wa” when it’s a particle.

を Is pronounced “wo” when it’s a letter and “o” when it’s a particle.

It just takes practice to overcome this, and even when you get good at it you will still make mistakes. Don’t let it frustrate you, it gets easier with experience.   

Pay Attention To The Dakuten

Some of the letters can be changed slightly with the addition of the Dakuten. This is when you see a little “or even an ° added next to the letter.

These are important as it does change the sound, for example:  か – が Ka become Ga.

Most of this is pretty straight forward and after a few days you will remember the alternative version. However, I do still sometimes find myself saying the original letter …while I think about what it should be replaced with.

So I might say “Ka, changes to a G sound, so this is Ga”. Although this only happens now with a few less common letters, most I can recognise instantly as their alternative/correct pronunciation.

You will be slow at the start, but with practice you will get faster at recognising the m correctly, just keep reading and practicing.

Long Vowels In Japanese

I guess the concept of long vowels is more to do with reading, but we are learning the letters so we can read, so I think it makes sense to cover this here.

There will be times you will see a word that has a long vowel in it and its important to spot them so you can say the word correctly. It’s mostly a U sound following on from another vowel and when you say this, you need to kind of drag the sound out, which is why it’s called a “long” vowel.

If you look at the following words you will hopefully get a better idea of what I’m talking about:

ありがとう – Arigatou (thank you) – pay attention to the to-u ending.

 おはよう Ohayou (good morning) – pay attention to the yo-u ending.

こうこうせいう koukousei (high school) – pay attention to the ko-u sound at the start.

Listen out for these long vowels when you are listening and more importantly when you are reading. You will hear how they letter kind of blend and are slightly more drawn out.

You will start to get more comfortable with how they should sound, which will ultimately lead you to sound more natural in Japanese.

The Small Tsu

You are also going to come across the small tsu character when you are reading and these are quite interesting. You don’t really read them, but they do tell you how to read the letters nearby.

Whenever you see this in a word, the letter after it doubles up …which actually means we kind of take a pause when saying these words. This makes more sense when you hear the word, so lookout for it.

If we take the word がっこう (school) it will make more sense. You can see the small tsu is before the letter こ and this means we double this up …well we double the start of this letter.

This word would be splat Ga-KKO-U …the K of the Ko becomes a double K. We also have the long vowel I mentioned above too, so this word more pronounced “ga-koo” where there is a little space between the ga and the K sound compared to normal .

Another example is かって, where the small tsu would make us double the first letter of て …so you would get ka-tte and again, we would leave a little gap in the speech between the ka and the te sounds.

Of course you need to make sure it’s a small tsu, as it could be a full size one, meaning you read the word normally as such and it would be very different sounding …かつて ka-tsu-te.

The ー In Japanese words

You will also see words that just have a dash after a letter, which seems very strange, but this is also just a little indicator to how something should be said.

The ー lets us know that we should double up on whatever letter comes before it.

If we look at コーヒー (Coffee) these dashes are telling us that this work is koohii, not just kohi.

The ー just extends the sound, you can see the line as sort of dragging the letter out to make it longer.

It is important to know this as the end result will sound very different if you ignore this.

Combination Hiragana

Combination hiragana is something I have personally struggled with a lot. I think everyone skims over these quickly as they are pretty simple, but they will still trip you up.

Even the japanesepod101 videos I recommend skim through super fast.

The issue for me is that it takes me a few seconds to recognise both characters and then decide how they blend together. For most of these it’s fine, but there are a few that just catch me out.

Characters like じゅ just take me a few extra seconds. I think the dakuten adds an extra layer that I need to think about and its slows me down, then I don’t feel as confident when I see these when reading.

It might also be due to the fact that this combination gets shortened down to just “JU” when you have to type it on a keyboard, it’s not “JYU” …although it really depends on your keyboard as both can work.

I think my issue is some online tests expect one or the other and then you can get it “wrong” when both are actually right as such.

I just know there are a few of these letters that annoy me. It’s not as easy as something likes みゅ where you take the M of mi, and add it to the YU, so you get MYU.

Really all these combinations just need practice, probably more than the letters on their own. The more you are exposed to them and forced to think what they mean, the better you will get reading them.

Tofugus test is really good for practicing these as you can select to just test yourself on these.

Similar Looking Japanese Letters

The biggest frustration you will suffer from for a good while is muddling things up. Sometimes it’s stupid mistakes, but often it is because they look too similar.

It’s easy to feel defeated and think you will never be able to do this, but can, as you have done it in English. Think about d and b, they are so similar, but you never mix these up and so long as you keep practicing your Japanese, the same will happen here.

Here are some Hiragana that look similar:  

• ちさ (chi, sa)
• ろる (ro, ru)
• ぬめ (nu, me)
• れねわ (re, ne, wa)

and here are some Katakana:

• マム (ma, mu)
• リル (ri, ru)
• ワヲ (wa, wo)
• ソツシ  (so, tsu, shi)

There is also ヒフ (hi, fu) …These two don’t look alike, but I always get them confused. I think this is because the reminder is to see one as a heel of a foot, and the other as a toe and in my head they just get confused.

The videos I recommended at the start of this article do give you some visual reminders and hints to help recall these differences, and they do help spot the difference. For example る (ru) is a hand holding a ruby, and ろ (ro) doesn’t, as its been robbed.

Just keep working on these; they will become clearer with time.

Conclusion

As you can see most of these issues are not too bad, they are annoying and it will take you time to iron them out, but they are not too troubling.

Really so long as you keep practicing the letters, and just generally reading as much as you can in Japanese they will start to become second nature and you will look back one day and laugh that you had these problems.

Just trust the process and keep studying.