Hiragana

Practice Hiragana

Enter the pronunciation of any Hiragana character and check your input. Use lowercase letters (e.g., 'ka' for か).

Stroke Order: Learning the correct stroke order is important. Check this resource for guidance.

About Hiragana

The first step to learning the Japanese language is to learn the sounds that exist in the language. There are no tones in Japanese like in many other Asian languages, with only 2 exceptions within the alphabet, which will be explained later. The Japanese alphabet does not contain letters but characters, technically a character set. The characters below are called Hiragana, the main alphabet or character set for Japanese.

Japanese also consists of two other character sets - Kanji (Chinese characters), which we will cover later, and Katakana, used mainly for foreign words (covered in Lesson 2). Don't wait to memorize all Hiragana characters before moving on—learn them as you progress through the lessons.

There are 5 vowels in Japanese:

• (a) - pronounced "ahh"
• (i) - pronounced like "e" in "eat"
• (u) - pronounced like "oo" in "soon"
• (e) - pronounced like "e" in "elk"
• (o) - pronounced "oh"

All Hiragana characters end with one of these vowels, except for (n). The only consonant that differs from English is the Japanese 'r', slightly rolled as if it were a combination of 'd', 'r', and 'l'.

Tenten (゛) and Dakuten (゜): These are diacritic marks added to certain Hiragana characters to change their consonant sounds. The `tenten` (゛) typically voices the consonant (e.g., か → が), while the `dakuten` (゜) modifies it further (e.g., は → ぱ). These variations are included in the table below.

Basic Hiragana Characters

Hiragana Ya, Yu, Yo Combinations

Hiragana can form additional sounds using small characters (e.g., ゃ, ゅ, ょ).