Hiragana Chart ひらがな

 

I had the advantage when I came to learning Japanese that I had learned another language with a non-roman script before, although that was a long time ago in high school.  I learned Classical Greek which used the Greek alphabet.  It was in high school, so I had the support of school language classes to do it, rather than working on my own.  It enforced discipline and practice.  It was also very different in that it was an alphabet, rather than a syllabary.  Japanese is very different in that style - each symbol is a sound.

When I learned to read in England, we learned the letters in alphabetical order, and had pictures of things that began with that letter, such as “a is for apple, b is for bee, c is for cat”.  That last one in particular really does not help - if you try reading it out loud, you will notice that you have just said “see is for cat”, which is a hard c or k sound.  Makes things much harder for children to grasp.  This was made even harder in my case by teachers trying to enforce their accent on me - when it was my turn to go read to the teacher, I would read “a cat” and be corrected to “uh cat” & I would point out that it was a letter a, not a letter u, and then I would get given The Look.  The look of an adult who knows better, but doesn’t have the time or energy to explain to you why you should do it other than just “I told you to”. I believe that the look is meant to be quelling.  I still say “a cat” to this day, so I may be a little harder to quell than some people.  Or just stubborn.  I did read an article recently that said that one reason that most English people have problems with Japanese is that they believe that “uh” is an “a” sound and cannot hear the difference.  If that is really true, child me has done now-me a huge favour there.

Phonics didn’t exist when I was learning to read, or it certainly didn’t in my part of England. Perhaps it was already in use in the US.  The first time I heard of “hooked on phonics” was from a Simpsons episode!  So the science of learning to read, even in English, has definitely changed.  

Interestingly, one of my friends is a teacher and has taught remedial reading in English, and I got to interview her recently for my radio show because she has written a book to help people teach their children to read, and her book doesn't follow the very old school method of "a is for apple", it teaches sounds* - each piece they have in their book actually makes a sound that they can use in a word, and she said that was why learning to read English is hard, because we have to learn items that don't make sounds and we cannot immediately us, we need to learn syllables/sounds not letters.  I got really excited and wanted to hijack the conversation to talk about the Japanese syllabaries and how we can instantly have sounds that we can use in both Hiragana and Katakana, but I had to keep the conversation on track for the radio show.  We did get to talk later about it & she found it interesting, the similarities there between the Japanese and what she was doing.   I would find it interesting, when I have time, to look up and see if there is research on rates or differences in issues learning to read between children learning Japanese syllabaries and English alphabets.

When I started learning Japanese, I dove straight into Hiragana because I had seen that it was a basic building block for Japanese, and I used apps for it, as well as a few websites - the websites were good because they had gifs that showed you an animation of the right stroke order, and the apps were good because they usually had a pronunciation with it - apps like Duolingo, Bunpo, Kana, & Kana Drill.  Also, the apps give you reminders so that you can do it every day & not forget.  I was frustrated when I did my Conversational Japanese class through JCCC that it used Romaji - I found to pronounce things correctly, I mentally had to translate it to Hiragana and then say it.  If I see "too", my brain wants to say it the English way, but if I see とお or とう, then my brain switches to Japanese pronunciation mode.

I found that rote memorization helped me most with the hiragana symbols. Luckily, I was able to see a copy of the Heisig mnemonic system online before spending money on a book of it.  I found it frustrating and that many of their symbols didn’t make sense to me.  And it seemed as much work to remember two eels for い as it was just to remember い, maybe even more (I cheated and checked the chart for an example).  The way my brain works, I seem to spend more effort on remembering the mnemonics than the actual hiragana themselves. I’m not sure if this is because I’m neurodivergent, or just that their mnemonics were not meaningful for me and I needed my own.  I certainly never thought that け looked like a keg!   

I only really used mnemonics when I reached a point where I realised that I was regularly confusing a few remaining ones (I think that was た、に、な in a group, and also は、ほ & まas well due to similar shapes.  I also had issues with け, although I no longer recall what I was confusing it with, or if I was just forgetting whether I needed to put a cross stroke on the left hand or right hand of the symbol.  I do know that I decided that my story for it would be kendo - the vertical bar on the left was the target, and the horizontal stroke on the right was the sword that was going to cut it, held by the person doing the sword practice - that also gives you the stroke order too, which keg does not).

Even with phonics, English can be hard to learn to read words because the same combination of letters can have different sounds, such as bow & bow (bending at the waist, versus the item you play the violin with or a bow in your hair).  In the Japanese syllabaries, each sound is supposed to be the same all the time.  The problem with that is one that people run into very quickly, because one of the first words that people run into in their learning is です - and the う sound of the end of that gets dropped.  There are lots of other words where an い or うsound gets dropped or elided, maybe even turned into a schwa would be a better way to phrase it.  

Whatever the correct technical name for it, most systems just tell you to say “dess” and point out other places as you meet them and expect you to build up a vast mental library of hundreds or thousands of exceptions to the rule.

But I was lucky & I found, by sheer chance, a video on YouTube that explained a rule that supercedes the first rule of “say every sound & they are always the same”.  Here’s a link to it - https://youtu.be/iYQM7BhJJns - only watch up to about 22 minutes, because at that point he starts talking about the interaction of devoicing (the correct term I wasn’t using above), and pitch accents.  I am staying away from pitch accents for as long as possible…  It’s certainly too early in this course to be talking about them.

I do also have to comment on his awesome merch that he was wearing - so many courses ask us to write ひらがなin hiragana, and then to write katakana in katakana, so it switches it up beautifully.

* basically phonics, but in case people do not know what phonics & the phonics system is, it teaches them from scratch.