profound looking character or maybe you just want to be able to read your favorite manga.

Regardless, before you get all muddled up in the more extensive Kanji, you’ll need

to learn the basics: hiragana and katakana. Let’s talk about hiragana today.

The written Japanese language is composed of three (some people say five) unique writing

systems and if you’re studying the language, hiragana is most likely where you’ll start.

Hiragana came from a series of Chinese characters, called ‘manyogana’ which were used for

their pronunciation. It was the cursive form of these ‘manyogana’ that eventually became

the commonly used hiragana characters you see in the Japanese language today.

When first introduced, hiragana was considered improper for use among men, so hiragana was

originally used almost exclusively by educated women. While hiragana was used for informal

writings such as correspondences or literature, official documents were usually written using

either kanji or katakana.

Originally, there existed multiple hiragana characters used to express the same syllables,

but this was all simplified in the year 1900 to one character one syllable. The deprecated

hiragana characters are called ‘hentaigana’ and only make very special appearances in

modern Japanese.

The complete hiragana script consists of 48 symbols, but you’re likely to only come

across 46 of them when studying modern Japanese. If laid out in a five by ten grid with the

vowels across the top and consonants along the side, you’d get something that looks

like this. Just read one of the vowels by itself or pair up a consonant with one of

the five vowels and you’ve got yourself a character.

For example, you’ve got the vowel ‘a’ which can be read by itself, but we’re going

to pair it up with the consonant ‘k’ and we get the character for ‘ka’. With the

exception of the ‘n’ character, you’re always going to have one of the five vowels

in the character. It’s for this reason that you often get hardly recognizable English

words when transliterated into the Japanese syllabary. Worlds like strawberry become su-to-ro-be-ri-i.

Things are somewhat further complicated with the addition of two different diacritical

marks that change unvoiced consonants into voiced consonant sounds or change characters

starting with ‘h’ to a ‘p’ sounds. ‘ka’ becomes ‘ga’ and ‘he’ becomes

‘pe’

Additionally, adding a small version of certain hiragana characters can cause the sound to

change to a glide to ‘a’, ‘u’ or ‘o’. ‘ki’ plus the small hiragana character

‘ya’ becomes ‘kya’ and if we add a diacritical mark, we can make it ‘gya’

GYAA!

And I promise, this is the last thing I’ll add to the list: there’s also a small version

of the hiragana character ‘tsu’ that can be added to words to double the sound the

following consonant makes. It doesn’t sound like that big a deal, but there are words

like: ‘saka’ which means hill and ‘sakka’ which means author.

But fear not English speakers! Compared to the 20 vowel and 24 consonant phonemes in

the English language, Japanese has only 5 vowel and 17 consonant phonemes. Despite everything

I’ve just mentioned, once you get your hands a bit dirty in hiragana, you’ll pick it

up quickly.

Thanks for watching this episode of The Japan Show, this is only the first part of a probably

three-part series on the Japanese language. We’re going to talk about ‘katakana’

and ‘kanji’ next! But as always, if you have any questions or suggestions for future

topics, be sure to leave a comment below, and if you want to see more episodes like

this one, head over to youtube.com/watchthejapanshow and subscribe!