LINE is a chat-based app that has become the highest-grossing social networking application in the world (mostly through the sale of emoticon-like stickers). LINE has gained popularity in Japan due to already mentioned (but very cute) stickers, chat-centered format, and picky friend-adding system that encourages privacy. So long as you have a cell phone you can join this rich and fruitful social land.

A long time ago Koichi wrote a post about Mixi and using it to study Japanese. One of the problems was that Mixi is a closed social network. You also had to have a Japanese cell phone email to join, making it hard to get in without jumping through the ever-changing loopholes. LINE is a much better social network for real Japanese study, and we’ll get into that in a minute. First, let’s open our history (e-)books.

How LINE Lined Up From Lines

After the Tohoku earthquake, the Japanese phone services were not working very well. I myself was in Japan at the time and remember trying to call my host family from school, but the phone lines (haha) were so clogged that I and countless others couldn’t get a dial tone for hours, even days after the incident. To make post-disaster communication easier, the Japanese branch of the Korean NHN corporation instigated a mobile application where people could use data or wifi to make free calls and texts. They named it LINE because during natural disasters, pay phones have been the most reliant way to contact your loved ones, where there are always long lines outside of them. It looks like LINE took some inspiration from the Japanese pay phone as well. Notice the bright green? The coincidence is a little too blinding to ignore.

Fast forward a couple of years. LINE now has 160 million users worldwide and is the number one free app in Japan and many other Asian countries. To put this in perspective, Instagram announced last Thursday that they have 130 million users, yet they launched in October 2010, which is two years before LINE came into existence. That’s incredibly fast growth.

So what is it that makes LINE so popular? Why do they have so many users if it’s just a chat application?

How LINE Works

The pink is just one of many soon-to-come customizable themes!

Line is chat-based, so you don’t have to worry about other people seeing those long, strange conversations that you have with your friend on your status like on Facebook. You can only register with a smartphone, ipod, or tablet, and you can have one account per device. However, once you register on your phone, you can download the app onto your Mac or Windows computer and access your account through there as well. You can add friends by user ID, scanning a qr code, or a shake function if you’re with the person irl (that’s “in real life” for those of you who don’t know). From there, chats, free calls through data or wifi, and fun downloadable related apps that connect with your LINE account await you!

One distinguishing chat feature is the group chat option. Once you create a group (of up to 100 people), you can communicate either through chat or through the chat group’s bulletin board. I’m included in groups for friends, classes, clubs, and even one where we just send each other pictures of what we’re eating. Once someone has read your message, a “read by” and “time” message pops up to let you know that your message has been seen. Now you can actually know whether someone is ignoring you or not! (′ʘ⌄ʘ‵)

You can also customize the chat background wallpapers for each individual chat! (Challenge mode- for each friend, change the wallpaper to the most unflattering picture of them that you can find.)

LINE’S Fun (And Addicting) Features – There’s Something for Everyone!

All that being said, it’s just a chat application with friends, right? How did something so simple and boring become such a huge phenomenon?

Those of you who use LINE will know that it’s not just chat, it’s so much more. They are feeding you crack under the table, slowly making you dependent and addicted to the service. It’s actually quite a lot of fun and has grown a great deal since its post-earthquake days. Sometimes, it’s those are little features within the chat, like being able to see when a message was read, and the ability to send audio messages, videos, and Japanese-style emoticons that get you. ❤(◕‿◕✿)  (ʘ‿ʘ )ノ✿

Here are some other extra-special in-chat and out-of-chat features. If the little features didn’t get you, at least one of these will cater to your individual personality needs.

For the Bad With Words

Say you’re chatting with your friend. After searching deep within yourself to identify your emotions, you just can’t find the words to express your feelings.

Don’t worry! LINE has you covered! Just look through your stickers (basically huge emoticons that send one at a time instead of text) and send one of those. Sometimes whole conversations can be comprised of just stickers (although they usually don’t make much sense).

When you join LINE, you get 3 packs of default stickers for free. These are your essentials, and feature the LINE-original characters who are becoming iconic in Japan. Those stickers are great, but if you are yearning for more, there are tons more stickers that you can buy in the shop. Some are LINE originals and some are characters that you already know and love, like Hello Kitty, Stitch, Nameko, and Ojarumaru. New ones come out every week too (I’m holding out for a Kobitodukan set)! If you live in Japan, limited edition free sticker sets come out every once in a while, but not in most other parts of the world.

For the Gamer

If you’re less of a chatterer and more of a gamer, you can still be social and play games with your friends on LINE. From the “more” section on the app, you can find a jumble of fun/addicting games that fit whatever kind of game preference you have. Most of the games are one-play arcade type games that have a certain amount of plays every few hours. When you run out, you can use in-game or out-of-game money to buy new plays, or you can receive and gift free plays to and from friends within the game. I hear this is the future of WaniKani, where you’ll have to pay for more reviews and your Crabigator friends can give you free review sessions (I’m just kidding, of course).

For the Narcissist

A LINE app for the creative narcissistic is the LINE Camera. LINE camera acts as your basic photo editing app, plus purikura-like extras. There are stamps, effects, and brushes available for free and for sale. Make yourself cute, or just make yourself strange like my example above. Your choice.

For the Rest

In addition to Camera are apps like LINE Card (which sends greeting cards) and LINE brush, which is just a fun drawing app. LINE seems to be getting their fingers into everything, but why not when you’re making oodles of yen from your enthusiastic and novelty-hungry userbase.

But What About My Japanese Studies?

Since there’s no way to look for people by real name or look at friends of friends, things may be kind of lonely for those of you without friends on LINE already. One particular LINE-affiliated app, LINE Cafe, is here to rescue you! It can rescue you from your solitude, plus, you can use it to practice your Japanese. How? Well, LINE Cafe is a forum and message board app, where you can meet people from all over who have the same interests as you.

Much like using Twitter to study Japanese by following Japanese tweeters, you can join boards in LINE Cafe to practice both reading and writing. Not to mention that some of these boards are specifically for language study, so people will be a little more forgiving there.

From there, you can meet Japanese LINE users and exchange IDs! Or just ask any young person in Japan- they probably have a LINE account.

If you’re a fan of Japanese musicians, TV shows, or brands (so many brands), you can also follow official accounts which will send you direct messages with information and updates, kind of like fan newsletters. Also, when they decide to turn their incoming messages on, you can actually talk to the famous person on the other end, or so I’ve heard (I’ve yet to actually see this happen).

After you’ve found your group or person to practice your Japanese with, it’s just a matter of doing it. Whether this is taking part in conversations, reading, or grabbing things to study for later in Evernote, iKnow, or something else, it’s up to you. Mainly, though, LINE is going to be a great way to get interested enough to force yourself to read and practice. It’s all a matter of finding what interests you, though.

Where LINE Is Heading

(Apparently it’s heading down a railroad track in Taiwan)

In July of 2012, a timeline function was introduced to LINE, turning the app into a real Facebook lookalike, and possibly a competitor. In fact, active Japanese Facebook users went from 17 million to 13 million in the past six months, many of them making the switch to LINE and its more simple platform. I don’t think that LINE will replace Facebook globally, as Americans love their Facebook, but it has definitely taken over Japan in a very short period of time. Because most people in Japan use the internet through their phones rather than computers, an app-based SNS just seems to make more sense than a web-based one!

Most Japanese people who I asked said that they liked LINE because mostly because of the sticker function. So, in a final plead to get Japanese users back, Facebook also released stickers to use on their mobile app. But Japanese users still use LINE.

Do I think that the Japanese facebook users will go back, or will LINE take over? I don’t know. But, the numbers aren’t very pleasant for the Zuckerburger. I’ve already mentioned how active users are declining for Facebook in Japan, but it’s more telling to see how fast LINE has been growing. LINE currently has 160 million users. Compare that to Instagram, which came out a year before LINE, which has 130 million users.  LINE is also very popular outside of Japan too, something that Mixi could never accomplish. 60% of LINE’s users exist outside of Japan. Taiwan has 16 million LINE users and Indonesia has over 23 million. Just from my own experience, I think that the only Japanese people who continue to use Facebook are those who have friends outside of Japan, or are people who are particularly interested in English.

That being said, LINE is mostly just popular in Asia though I hear it’s picking up in Spanish-speaking countries as well. How well it does in the English speaking world remains to be seen. If it keeps growing this fast, it’ll be hard to not feel its grip around social media’s neck sooner rather than later. In fact, out of the 160 million on LINE, 50 million of those joined within a 3-month period, making it the fastest-growing social network ever. That’s a lot of people in not very much time!

So what will the future bring? No one knows! I will however say that it isn’t LINE down and being quiet.

If you have a LINE account or have been inspired to create one, post your ID’s in the comments! We’ll add you to our cool new Tofugu group so you can talk about your favorite tofu and fugu dishes.

EDIT: Add the user “tofugu” to be added to the tofugu group!

What is Passive Learning

When it comes to Japanese, passive learning (or at least the kind I’ll be talking about here) most often comes from listening to and consuming Japanese audio-visual media. The passive bit is that you’re not actively doing anything other than just listening to the Japanese language. You’re not taking any notes, you’re not stopping the video/audio/game to review what you heard or anything – you’re just listening to it and taking in the language as it is.

This can be done both with and without English subtitles, depending on your current level of Japanese ability, but I’d say that the more Japanese you already know, the more you’ll get out of passive learning in this sense. It’s all about consuming Japanese media and not worrying over vocabulary or anything yucky like that. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

For more about passive learning (and Japanese), you can check out this article and this article from TIME, as well as How Many Hours You Should Study Japanese A Day.

How Passive Learning Helps the Beginner

But how can passive learning benefit you if you don’t know any Japanese at all? Even before you’ve started learning the Japanese language, there are lots of easy things you can do to help you for the future. Just hearing Japanese being used gets you more comfortable with the language. Even if you don’t know what they’re saying, hearing the language over and over causes it to become less strange to you. The more you hear it, the less foreign sounding it is to your ears.

Maybe you’ll hear someone out in public and you’ll be able to realize they’re speaking Japanese (even though you might not be sure exactly what they’re saying). It might not seem like that big of a deal, but it’s definitely one of the first steps in learning the language. You just have to get comfortable with how it sounds. You gotta get used to it.

One of the biggest advantages to listening to lots of Japanese before you actually learn how to speak it is getting nice and familiar with how Japanese should sound. You get a much better handle for pronunciation, accent, and tone than if you just went into it without any prior listening experience. Whether you realize it or not, your brain is subconsciously paying attention to how Japanese sounds. This makes it much easier for you to reproduce these sounds correctly when the time comes. Well, usually at least.

This really helps out, especially by keeping you from getting into any bad pronunciation habits. If you already know how it should sound, you’ll be much less likely to get used to pronouncing things incorrectly or ingraining your personal Japanese with a bad accent because you and your brain already know what a proper accent should sound like. This is a good thing.

Before I started actually learning Japanese at college, I listened to a lot of movies, anime, and music, and I’m very confident that all this passive listening really helped me out a lot with my pronunciation and accent once I started to learn and speak the language. It might not work for everyone like this, but it sure helped me.

The Tools of Passive Learning

So what’s the best way to do this passive learning? What are the best materials to make use of? Well there are tons. We have anime, dramas, movies, music, podcasts, games, and even audio books. Do you have a favorite Japanese show or movie? Watch it in Japanese with the subtitles turned off.

You’ll still be able to follow along with it since you know the story already, and your brain might even start to pick up on some common words and phrases just by watching and listening. Or, you might learn some words you heard in the show at a later date and you’ll remember when you heard them in the show which will help you to retain that information.

This also goes for video games that have a Japanese audio option. If it has that option, you should always make good use of it. It might not be as effective as shows and movies since you’ll still have to read along with that pesky English dialogue, (unless of course you can understand without it, in which case, well done) but listening to the Japanese audio is way better than listening to the English audio. Some Japanese is always better than none at all, I say.

But what about when you’re on the go? Maybe you don’t have time to sit down and play a game or watch a show. Maybe you’re in your car, on the subway, or going for a run or a bike ride. This is the perfect opportunity to make use of audio only media like podcasts, music, and audio books. For those interested, Koichi did a post about Japanese podcasts and how to make good use of them which you can check out here.

Listening to music is also good for pronunciation if you find yourself singing along with the words, even if you don’t know what they mean. Of course, it also helps out a lot if you can make out the words they’re singing. Listening to Fear, and Loathing in Las Vegas, for example, isn’t going to help you out much.

Audio books are another option I think most people forget about. Do you love Harry Potter? Get it on audio book. In Japanese. Even if you don’t know much Japanese, you’ll still be able to pick out the words you do know like Hogwarts, Dumbledore, and Voldemort. Plus you’ll be hearing them like how they’d be said in Japanese which also helps with your pronunciation, especially loan words and other things written in katakana.

Believe me, it’s more useful than you’d think. Listen to bits and pieces on your daily commute. It’ll be much more useful than top 40 tunes, I assure you. Plus it’s much less stressful than trying to follow along with some audio language lesson while you’re dealing with rush hour traffic or something. With these materials you just sit back and listen.

Best When Paired With Active Learning

Unfortunately, passive learning alone won’t get you very far. The only times I’d really recommend passive learning by itself is if you’re a complete beginner, or starting to near that elusive master level. When you’re a complete beginner, passive learning helps a lot with getting comfortable with the sounds of the language and hearing proper pronunciation and accent like I mentioned above. Then once you’re comfortable with how the language sounds, you can actually start to learn and pronounce it with confidence.

And then when you’re nearing master level, you can get away with passive learning because you already know so much of the language already. Most of the new stuff you’re just picking up in your head and making new associations that way. Your brain is automatically doing most of the work for you. Maybe every once in a while you’ll hear a new word that you need to write down and look up later, but most of the time you’ll probably be picking up things through context and intuition.

It’s really during the middle part (and it’s a very big middle, by the way) that you’ll be best off pairing your passive learning with some good old fashioned active learning. This is also the period of learning that requires the most work on your part. Some of the best ways to do this are to pick out one of your favorite shows, like a drama or an anime, and then make an Anki flashcard deck (or find one somebody else made) with all the vocabulary from the show that you want to learn or focus on.

Once you have these cards, you can actively study them, and break up your active studies by passively watching the show and hearing your hard work pay off through the words and phrases you recognize. This also reinforces your learning experience, and makes the words and phrases easier to remember since they’re linked with the show in your brain, with both the audio and the visual aspects. For more information on this, you can check out the post by Koichi that explains how to study with Japanese dramas.

Results May Vary

Okay, you got me. So you really can’t learn Japanese without doing anything, but it is true that there are a handful of easy things that can be done with little to no extra effort that are certainly helpful. Most of them help more when you include some active learning along with them, but it’s always nice to break up your active studies with some passive ones (passive ones are a lot less stressful and more fun anyway).

There’s lots of conversation online in forums and such about the potential benefits and the pros and cons of the passive approach to learning languages like this, but I think all would agree that it certainly doesn’t hurt, and some people will get more out of it than others.

One thing that is true, though, is that the more hours you put into Japanese, the more you’ll get out of it. Even if you aren’t actively studying, and you feel bad about slacking on your studies because of how much anime you’re watching, don’t beat yourself up too much. Watching anime is helping your Japanese a lot more than doing something that doesn’t involve Japanese at all (like basket weaving).

But don’t let passive learning become all that you do either. It’s nice to break up your active studies with passive Japanese exposure, but don’t let it become your only means of study. You don’t want to get yourself into a slump. If you’re at the intermediate level and feel like you’re getting into a slump or losing motivation, check out my other post on How To Conquer the Intermediate Plateau of Japanese. Maybe it can help you out.

I don’t believe that passive learning alone will learn you a language, but like I said, it’s a great way to break up chunks of active study, it’s easy to do, and it’s fun. Having fun while you learn is one of the most important things you can do. Plus, some Japanese is better than no Japanese at all. So get out there and watch an anime or something!

So tell me, what are your thoughts on passive learning and its relationship with active learning? Have you ever had any instances where you realized how much (or how little) passive learning was helping you with your Japanese studies? Share your story in the comments!

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The “How To Learn Japanese” How-To Guide

Last year we started up a page full of various Japanese learning resources (and we’re still working on it, a little at a time). Japanese resources are all and good because there are only a certain number of resources out there, and we knew what we wanted to look at first. With Japanese “How-To” guides, we’re not quite as sure. We have, however, posted up a ton of placeholders for things we want to work on, and that’s where you come in.

If you could visit the How-To Guide page and look through what’s there now then come back here to let us know what you’re dying to know, we’ll know what we should work on first. We’re only planning on putting up approximately one new one per week since they take quite a bit of time to do, so your opinion will actually matter 0_0

There actually is a few How-To guides already up there, though. Three of them have to do with setting up the ability to type in Japanese (Ubuntu, MacOSX, Windows). The fourth one is a much better and much updated version of the “Gendered Language” post that I put up on Tofugu a long time ago (here’s the new Gendered Language page). I hope its new home and fancy updates will be incredibly useful to a lot of you studying Japanese (especially those of you who are worried about sounding like too much of a tough guy or too much of a whiny little girl).

So, I’m afraid that’s it for today. Lucky for you, the Gendered Language how-to guide is just like a post, so I won’t go to bed tonight feeling particularly guilty. Just the normal crying and sobbing that accompany my night terrors, nothing to do with this!

Visit: Tofugu’s Japanese How-To Guides Page

On TextFugu, I recently rewrote and improved the “reading and writing hiragana” chapter (feel free to check it out, it’s free), improving it a lot. The idea was to create a step by step process that anybody could use to learn hiragana so that they could move on to the “good stuff.” There were a few goals with this:

1. Make learning hiragana simpler.
2. Create a step-by-step process that anybody could follow.
3. Take the “mystery” out of learning hiragana (especially hard for self-learners).

After coming up with everything and writing it down, I thought it would be useful for readers of Tofugu as well, so I’m posting up a slightly modified hiragana how-to guide for all of you to enjoy as well. If you’re just starting to learn Japanese, or haven’t started yet, this is one of the first things you want to do. There’s no better time than now, right?

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Before You Get Started

For this guide, I’ll be combining several resources. The idea is to take from the best and ignore the rest, organizing for you a great set of resources that will help you to learn how to read and write hiragana (and ultimately allow you to learn Japanese). Before you get started, there are a few preliminary steps I think you should take. They’re optional, technically, but they’ll really help you learn hiragana a lot more effectively and quickly, in the long run.

1. Read about the various Japanese alphabets.

If you knew there was more than one Japanese “alphabet” (okay, fine, they aren’t technically alphabets, but that doesn’t matter much), then maybe you can skip this step. If you didn’t know this, then you should do some reading so that you understand more about what it is you’re about to learn. If you don’t do this, it would be like learning the English alphabet without knowing the letters spell words. With so many Japanese “alphabets” this reading is pretty important.

There’s two ways you can do this:

1. Read some really in depth articles about hiragana, katakana, kanji, and romaji on wikipedia (this is the more complicated option).
2. Read about the Japanese “alphabets” on TextFugu (simpler, quicker, but not as in depth).

I don’t know which one you want to do, but to be honest either is probably fine. Personally, I’d go with the simpler one (#2), just because you only need to know some background info, not become a PhD in Japanese linguistics.

After you’ve gotten the background info on the various Japanese writing systems, you can move on to the next step.

2. Learn The Pronunciation

For me, I think learning pronunciation and understanding how the “patterns” of hiragana work are important to do before you learn to read and write. If you spend some time on this first, you can then associate this with the reading and writing that you learn a little later. Learning the pronunciation of hiragana before you learn hiragana will help you build a foundation of better Japanese pronunciation, help you to understand how the Japanese language works, and ultimately speed up your hiragana learning in the long run (I think it will, anyways).

1. Hiragana pronunciation can be looked at on TextFugu as well (another free chapter)

After you’ve gone through this, you’ll be ready to start learning the reading and writing parts of hiragana.

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The Hiragana How-To Guide

Before you start, I want you to think back to your days of when you learned how to read/write own native language. This will help you to readjust any unrealistic expectations. Most likely, it took you years to get comfortable with English (or whatever you grew up with). Despite this, you’re going to be able to learn hiragana much faster. It’s going to be hard, and you should expect to be perfect in one, two, or even three weeks. It’s a process, and the more you practice the better you’ll end up getting at it, just like anything (as long as you practice the right things, whoops).

1. Download A Hiragana Chart

I’ve actually made a hiragana chart that you can download right here. I think it’s pretty simple, printable, and easy to use. Feel free to use it, give it away, or whatever else you want to do with it. It’s a totally free hiragana chart.

[ilink style="download" url="http://www.tofugu.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/hiragana-chart.pdf"]Download Hiragana Chart[/ilink]

You’re going to be using this a lot, so print it out (if you have a printer) and make it handy.

2. Let’s Take A Look At Some Words You Know Already

Despite what you might think, reading and writing Japanese (at least when it comes to kana) is actually really easy. In order to illustrate that, I thought we could look at some words you already know, starting with the word “sushi.”

For the most part, all hiragana characters (or kana) consist of a consonant (a letter that’s not a vowel) and a vowel. If you look at your hiragana chart, you’ll see that there are things like “ka, chi, mu, ra, hu, ji” etc. Although there are some “weird” ones, like “shi, chi, tsu” etc., that are two consonants plus a vowel, you can probably see the basic pattern emerge. Other than this, the only exceptions are “n” (a single consonant) and “a, i, u, e, o” (which are just vowels on their own).

So, knowing that kana pretty much consists of a consonant sound and a vowel sound, let’s figure out how to spell “sushi” in hiragana. It’s quite easy.

The word “sushi” consists of two separate kana: SU + SHI. Take a look at your hiragana chart and see if you can find the kana for both of these (su & shi). What are they? Just for the sake of letting things sink it, go ahead and copy the characters “su” and “shi” in order to write the word “sushi” out. All you have to do is copy them off the chart, we’ll be really learning them in a bit.

This image is taken from the hiragana chart we’re using, and I’ve circled the correct characters. Now, on the sheet they aren’t in the correct order, but when you write out す (su) and し (shi) together, you get すし (sushi). Writing in hiragana really is that simple. It’s amazing, right?

Now, unfortunately, there is a kanji for this word as well (寿司 = すし = sushi), but you don’t need to worry about that at all right now. We’re focusing on hiragana for the time being. Let’s take a look at another word, karate.

This word is often mispronounced as “karadee,” but if you use your knew found knowledge of hiragana pronunciation you’ll realize how karate is actually pronounced. Let’s write it out in kana.

Take the word “karate” and break it up into its individual kana parts (I’ll give you a hint, there’s three parts). Find those three kana on your hiragana chart and write the word out. Pronounce the three individual kana to find out the correct pronunciation of the word karate. Did you get it right?

When you write “karate” out in hiragana, it comes out to からて. This is the hiragana for KA + RA + TE. Totally different from “karadee” that most people end up saying everywhere else.

After taking a look at these, are you starting to understand how hiragana is used to write things in Japanese? Do you also understand how kana in hiragana are pronounced (consonant + vowel, etc)? Good, let’s move on to the actual process of learning to read and write hiragana.

3. Learning to Read & Write

Before you get started, you should make sure that you have a Smart.fm account. This is what we’re going to use to drill the individual kana to help you learn them. We’ll be using it quite a bit in this guide, so it’s best you get an account now so you’re ready.

First 10 Hiragana: あいうえ、おかきくけこ

1. Study your first ten hiragana using Smart.fm – あ、い、う、え、お、か、き、く、け、こ. You’ll have an option of studying these either 5 at a time or 10 at at time. I’d recommend choosing 5 for now, until you get better. Here’s a quick screencast going over how you should use Smart.fm to study your hiragana.

[yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7keQJIpJXZE']

Essentially, you want to…

1. Write the kana down every time you get it right (or wrong)
2. Use the pronunciation audio that’s available to you on Smart.fm
3. Only study 5 at a time
4. Let Smart.fm tell you when you’ve learned something (usually it’s pretty good at that)

2. Go to Drag n’ Drop Hiragana, and only drag the first ten hiragana (a-column and ka-column) into the right spaces. By only doing these ones, you’ll have to find the right hiragana amongst all the other hirgana (helping you differentiate them) and secondly force you to remember what they look like. Try this twice (refresh to restart) and see if you can do it faster the second time!

3. After you feel good about the first 10 kana on Smart.fm, it’s time to put some of that into practice. Complete this worksheet and try to cheat as little as possible.

[ilink style="download" url="http://www.textfugu.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/hiragana-1-10.pdf"]First 10 Hiragana Practice[/ilink]

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Hiragana 11-20: さしすせそ、たちつてと

Of course, it’s important that you review the kana you just studied while you’re learning your new kana, so we’ll make sure to do that here.

1. Start by writing out the ten kana that you know and try to do it from memory (starting with あ and ending with こ). If you had to peek it’s not the end of the world. Write out the romaji next to / below / above them for reference.

2. Now write out the ten new kana (sa-column and ta-column) along with the romaji. These are the kana you’re about to study.

3. Go ahead and open the Smart.fm Master Hiragana list again. Since you finished the first 10 kana on there, you should be able to do the next ten now. Do them in groups of five, just like before until you’ve completed up until と (to). Remember to follow the steps from before where you write out the kana each time you get it right or wrong.

4. Visit RealKana and check the four columns of hiragana that you know already. Click on the katakana tab and uncheck anything that’s checked (you don’t want to learn katakana yet). Now, hit the practice tab and go through the practice a few times, until you feel good about reading the kana.

5. After you feel fairly decent about the first twenty kana (especially the new stuff) complete this worksheet to really solidify that knowledge.

[ilink style="download" url="http://www.textfugu.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/hiragana-11-20.pdf"]First 20 Hiragana Practice[/ilink]

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Hiragana 21-30: なにぬねの、はひふへほ

You’re actually past the halfway point for the “main” hiragana now! Just keep going, you’re making good progress!

1. Write down your ten new hiragana on your piece of paper with the other hiragana, so you can have them for reference.

2. Log on to Smart.fm, and complete the next ten hiragana (na-column and ha-column). As always, be sure to write down the individual kana every time you get it right or wrong, so you can practice writing. If you need help with stroke order, you can always use the stroke order guide on the hiragana chart page.

3. After feeling okay about the next ten, complete this work sheet, which helps you practice reading and writing the individual kana.

[ilink style="download" url="http://www.textfugu.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/hiragana-21-30.pdf"]First 30 Hiragana Practice[/ilink]

4. Visit RealKana and check the four columns of hiragana that you know already. Click on the katakana tab and uncheck anything that’s checked (you don’t want to learn katakana yet). Now, hit the practice tab and go through the practice a few times, until you feel good about reading this kana (you should be pretty good, actually!).

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Hiragana 31-46: まみむめも、やゆよ、らりるれろ、わを、ん

You’re almost there! In terms of the “main” hiragana, this is the last of it. After this, you’re just learning things you already kind of know (like dakuten and combo hiragana), which means you’re pretty much all the way there. Just a few loose ends to tie up after this.

1. Write down your new hiragana on your piece of paper, along with the romaji, for reference.

2. Log on to Smart.fm and finish out the hiragana until ん (n). There’s more than this on Smart.fm, but that’ll come soon enough. Make sure you’re writing down the hiragana you get both right and wrong. Once you’ve finished it up until ん, move on to the next step.

3. Go to RealKana, and this time only check columns な, は, ま, や, ら, & ん. You’re learning more this round, so I want you to focus it a little more on recent kana. Here’s an image to show you what to check (make sure you uncheck the katakana columns in the katakana tab too, if you need to).

Go through these a couple of times until you feel comfortable with them.

4. Complete this worksheet, which focuses on ま through ん columns.

[ilink style="download" url="http://www.textfugu.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/hiragana-ma-n.pdf"]Hiragana ま – ん[/ilink]

5. Head on back to Drag n’ Drop Hiragana. In theory, you should be able to complete the puzzle now (rather than just little bits of it). How fast can you get it done? Record your times and see if you can get done in under three minutes.

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Dakuten: がぎぐげご、ざじずぜぞ、だぢづでど、ばびぶべぼ、ぱぴぷぺぽ

In theory, these should be easier than what we’ve been doing so far. You already know the main characters (which dakuten use) and all you have to do is know what little symbol to put next to them (hint: usually it’s a quotation mark). That being said, I’m going to give you more things than normal to study in this section. You should be better at studying hiragana by now, and you should also know the symbols above (minus the dakuten part). I won’t say this section is easy, but it should be easier.

1. Start up Smart.fm and work through the dakuten hiragana. You should finish on ぽ (po). As always, keep writing these things out as you do them whether you get a card right or wrong.

2. Complete this worksheet. This worksheet’s goal is to help you remember what a column will change to when dakuten are added to it. Focus more on remembering that “S” goes to “Z” or “T” goes to “D” rather than focusing on individual kana.

[ilink style="download" url="http://www.textfugu.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/dakuten.pdf"]Dakuten Practice[/ilink]

3. On RealKana, let’s practice dakuten hiragana as well as the original kana from which the dakuten came. Check the か, さ, た, は, が, ざ, だ, ば, & ぱ columns. Here’s an image to illustrate:

Make sure you uncheck any katakana columns that might be checked as well. Go through the drills like this until you feel pretty comfortable telling them apart. Can you write them out on your own now? If I said things like…

What do “K-sounds” turn into?

Answer: “G-Sounds”

What do “H-sounds” turn into (two answers here)

Answer: “B & P Sounds”

What do “D-sounds” turn back into?

Answer: “T-Sounds”

What do “Z-sounds” turn back into?

Answer: “S-Sounds”

Could you answer all these questions? If not, be sure to drill RealKana a little bit more so you can learn the differences. Really, just learning these differences is the secret to learning dakuten, so if you can do that, you can do dakuten :)

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Combination Hiragana: きゃ、しゃ、ちゃ、にゃ、ひゃ、みゃ、りゃ、ぎゃ、じゃ、ぢゃ、びゃ、&　ぴゃ Columns

Sometimes, certain kana can be written smaller. When placed next to another kana, it can modify the way it sounds. Don’t worry, though, because the modifications actually make a lot of sense. For example:

き + small ゃ = きゃ (which sounds like kya). It’s almost like saying KIYA, but you drop the “i” sound. KYA!

There are other “combo-hiragana,” but these are the main ones, and the most important for you to know right now. Combo-kana will get a little crazier once we hit katakana, but for now it should be fairly straight forward, especially after you drill them for a bit.

1. Fire up your good buddy Smart.fm again. By now, you should be through the dakuten, and ready to study the combo-hiragana, starting with きゃ, きゅ, and きょ. Since you already know all the characters being used (you just have to remember that the y-column kana are “small”) feel free to study ten at a time. The goal is to get to the end of this list, actually and finish out everything that Smart.fm has to offer. Like I said, though, these should be one of the easiest sets (even though its the longest) for you, and drilling through it should be more about reviewing kana you already know.

2. Let’s practice writing them. Remember, the やゆよ for these are small ゃゅょ. If you don’t write them small, they are just regular sized, and pronounced normally. It’s the difference between:

きや (kiya)　vs　きゃ (kya)

Those are two different sounds and you can’t switch them out with each other. The difference is important! Use this worksheet to practice:

[ilink style="download" url="http://www.textfugu.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/combo-hiragana.pdf"]Combination Hiragana[/ilink]

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At this point, you should feel fairly good about almost all the hiragana. You don’t need to be perfect, nor do you need to be at 100%. That’s definitely not expected at this point. It’ll take a while before you read hiragana nice and fluidly, but luckily there’s going to be plenty of opportunity to practice as you continue to study Japanese (now in hiragana!). Well done!

Where To Go From Here?

Well, there’s plenty of things to do, but I’d round out your hiragana reading & writing career with some lessons on hiragana’s long vowels and the small tsu. That right there will make sure you know just about everything you need to know about hiragana, then all that’s left is more practice.

By learning hiragana, though, you’ve opened up a ton of new resources from which you can study Japanese. If you don’t know hiragana, you’re really limited in what you can do. If you do learn it (like you just did, in theory), there’s so much more available to you now, whether it’s various Japanese textbooks, blogs, websites, or whatever. Hiragana will open doors for you.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, and I hope you found it useful as well. If you’re thinking of learning Japanese, this isn’t a bad place to start, and I think this guide lays everything out pretty simply and easily. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions!

P.S. If you wish this tutorial was 140 characters or less, you should follow Tofugu on Twitter.

P.P.S. If you want to read a more in depth guide to learning hiragana, you’ll want to check out the first six chapters of TextFugu (all are free).

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