Hiragana

Time To Learn Your あいえ’s

As stated on the previous page, hiragana is the first writing system you’ll learn with Katsukats. It’s the closest thing to an alphabet you’ll find in Japanese. Each hiragana character represents either a vowel sound, a combination of a vowel and a consonant, or—in a single case—a consonant by itself. There are 46 symbols for you to memorize before you can really dive into Japanese, so it’s important to get started as soon as possible. With a little practice you’ll be reading these curly symbols as easy as you read English letters!

Side Note: In case you forgot, a vowel is a sound made by “A, I, U, E, or O” while a consonant is a sound like “T, D, K, or P”.

Okay, But How Do I Learn All These Symbols?

Until Katsukats develops it’s own resources for teaching hiragana (and later katakana), we’ll be using other free online resources to teach these syllabaries. You can find these amazing resources below!

Tofugu Hiragana Guide

This guide is an amazing first step for learning hiragana from ground level. It’s a very in-depth guide that is easily digestible for anyone. It not only shows how to read the symbols, but it also explains exactly how they’re pronounced and combined to build words. The guide also provides sound bites so you can hear a Japanese speaker pronouncing the sounds so you can make sure you’re correctly pronouncing everything from the start. Don’t want to form any bad habits early on, right?

RealKana

Realkana is a flashcard application which slowly introduces new hiragana symbols until you’re flying through all the kana without issue. There’s the free web application, a paid iOS app, and a free third-party Android app! (Note: We’ve never used either app, only the browser version.) If you use RealKana in conjunction with the article above, you can be sufficiently comfortable with hiragana within a week and able to move on to the next steps of this course.

BEFORE MOVING ON…

…Make sure you’re reasonably comfortable with hiragana. Take your time, learning a language isn’t something you can just rush through, so move forward when you’re ready. The next pages in this guide will assume you can read hiragana, so strike your best battle pose and charge forward when ready!