For beginners, though, finding Japanese things to read that are at or around your level is a pain. Either you study what’s in your textbook (limited and often times boring) or you don’t get to study reading it much at all. You essentially have to wait until you reach a higher level in order to have something for reading practice which will slow down your reading ability in the long run.

There’s good reason that beginners don’t have as much to study with, though. Basically, it comes down to not knowing enough kanji. If you don’t know the kanji, resources options are limited, though that doesn’t mean it isn’t helpful to read. Reading teaches you grammar and how to use it. It also will help you with your kana and basic kanji fluency (which normally takes too long in my opinion without enough early reading practice). You’ll also learn a lot of useful, common words, which of course is useful.

Since it’s normally pretty hard for beginners to find reading resources (and because I get this email like every day, it seems), I thought it would be good to put together a list of resources for beginners to study with. I’ll list them below and write a little bit about each including some suggestions on how to study with them. If you have any additional suggestions, please post them in the comments, below.

Have fun!

Japanese Children’s Newspapers

You probably know about newspapers for adults, but did you know about newspapers just for children? They tend to talk about slightly more cheerful things and are written in a much more simple fashion (easier kanji, easier words, easier everything), which is good for people who are still beginners of Japanese. There are some problems, though. Furigana is prevalent in a lot of them which kind of defeats the purpose in my opinion. I’ll be sure to note these ones down as well as tell you of a workaround to get rid of the furigana when it’s there.

Kodomo Asahi

Heralding from the adult Asahi Shinbun comes “Kodomo Asahi,” a version of their newspaper made for children. There aren’t a ton of articles here, but definitely plenty enough to keep any beginner busy on a fairly regular basis. There is a “elementary school” section and a “middle school” section.

Both are fairly basic, but of course the elementary school one is going to be a lot simpler. Between the two, there’s probably a new article every couple of days, especially when you consider the other additional sections available.

I think the level of kanji and vocab here is fairly good for a beginner. They also don’t do the furigana thing, which is nicer for your studies. In terms of the newspapers, this is a pretty darn good one. That being said, they don’t update every day, so you’ll want something else if you’re studying very regularly.

Visit: Kodomo Asahi

Kodomo Times

The Kodomo Times is made by Chuunichi Shinbun. It’s similar in a lot of ways to Kodomo Asahi in that it tends to have happier stories and is of course a lot simpler compared to a regular newspaper.

The thing that’s good (and kinda bad) about the Chuunichi Kodomo Times is that it will have the readings for words in parenthesis after the kanji that kids aren’t supposed to know. I’m not sure what the cutoff is, but it seems to be somewhere in elementary school. This means that it tells you the readings of slightly more difficult kanji while making you read the simple ones on your own. For people who are really, really beginner this will work pretty well. If you’re on the higher end of beginner it may feel a little like cheating.

Still, this is another good reading resources for beginners out there. You’ll just have to try it out to see if it’s good for you and your particular level.

Visit: Kodomo Times

NHK News Easy

Last but not least is News Web Easy by NHK. Not only do they provide news using simple kanji and vocab, but they also provide audio too, which means you can read along and do some language shadowing (or something along those lines).

While this is awesome, every single kanji has some furigana above it, which is kind of lame for your practice. There is a (difficult) way around this, though. If you download the browser add-on firebug (for Firefox or Chrome, maybe others as well), you can “inspect” the furigana on the page then add “display: none;” to the “rt” element. This will remove the furigana. Of course, this isn’t the best solution for ordinary folk out there, but it does work and does make this a much better resources, in my opinion. Alternatively, you can also print the pages out and just blot it out with a black marker. Either way, try not to study with the furigana there.

Update: Awesome! No more furigana. This makes Easy News an even better resource… probably the best out of these three, now.

There’s three or four “Easy” articles posted up every day, so you have plenty of opportunity to practice. If you’re feeling particularly good looking, as well, you can also see the original article. Just click “一般のニュース原稿はこちら” and you’ll be taken to the place from which your Easy article was painfully birthed out of.

Visit: NHK News Easy

Japanese Children’s Stories

Although Japanese children’s stories don’t come up with new content every day like the news does they are a nice way to get your beginner reading practice in. Since so many children’s stories are from a million years ago, you can find them for free on the internet as well. Of course, if you want physical copies you could go out and buy them / order them off of Kinokuniya or some other website, but I think the digital version will do just fine, not to mention you can print them out and take notes.

Here are some Japanese Children’s Book resources that I thought were good.

Traditional Japanese Children’s Stories

This website was made by Tom Ray for his own studies in Japanese. He decided to make it available to the public to help others out as well, which is awesome.

He took a bunch of traditional Japanese children’s stories and typed them out in Japanese. Then, he added in the English translation, line-by-line. Afterwards, he provides vocabulary explanations as well. A lot of the work is done for you, which can be good or bad, though it’s definitely an educational way to go through Japanese stories while practicing reading. You’ll find the sentence-by-sentence format particularly helpful, I think.

The pages are particularly printable, as well, meaning you can study and take notes as needed.

Visit: Traditional Japanese Children’s Stories

Fuku Musume’s Fairy Tale Collection

This Japanese fairy tale website is organized into various categories, from “famous Japanese stories” to “Scary Japanese stories” to “stories from around the world.”

There’s a lot of fairy tales here, plenty to keep any beginner busy for quite a while (and enough to get you much better at reading). A fair number of the stories also have audio to go along with them, meaning you can use the audio to help you to read along (and get the pronunciation right). Although not every story has this, you should take advantage of the ones that do. Reading out loud and mimicking a native speaker is always a good thing to do when you can, especially when you’re first starting out.

There’s probably 400 or 500 stories here, so that’s enough to read one every day for a year plus. If you do that, you’ll surely get better at reading Japanese. Remember, it’s all about consistency if you want to get better!

Visit: Fuku Musume’s Fairy Tail Collection

Fantajikan

Although Fantajikan has a site with stories on it, they’re more about audio than anything else. That’s why the YouTube channel is what makes this website worth adding to this list. The YouTube channel doesn’t have all the stories from the site, but I do think it’s more useful for beginner’s practice.

Included in each video is images showing what’s going on, a narration of the story, and Japanese text showing what the narrator is saying (this is where the reading practice comes in). The nicest part about these is the images in the video, though. They show the context of what’s going on adding another element to your practice. You just get a little more feedback this way.

Visit: Fantajikan, Fantajikan YouTube

Children’s Manga

Manga is another way to get in reading practice. For beginners, of course, children’s manga is what’s going to be good… things like Doraemon, Dragonball Z, and so on. There are also some manga that aren’t necessarily for children but provide furigana for the tough stuff and none for the easy stuff (fine for beginner practice), though you’ll have to poke around to find the perfect level of this for you.

In general, though, I’d recommend only children’s manga for beginners. It will be simple enough to read yet difficult enough to make you struggle (and learn). You’ll also get images to help with context, which will help you to understand more how the words and grammar are working together to form Japanese.

As for finding manga? If you’re lucky, you’ll live near a Japanese bookstore (Kinokuniya, for example). If you’re not so lucky, you can always order off Amazon or some dropshipping service. If you live in Japan or visit Japan, though, children’s manga can be found for super cheap especially if you get something used. It’s not particularly heavy to carry, either. Just get it on the last day of your trip.

What Else Can Beginners Practice With?

While I started by talking about how reading practice is very limited for beginners, I hope you’ve come away with the feeling that there are options out there for you. That being said, there’s probably plenty more to add to this list.

There’s textbooks with a ton of reading practice in them, workbooks that go with the lessons, sites like JapanesePod101 that have text with their audio lessons, Japanese websites for children, Japanese blogs that use simple Japanese, and I’m sure much, much more. The more you look, the more you’ll end up finding. Hard part is actually looking, though, so hopefully I did some of that work for you just now.

Now, if you’re finding that you’re having trouble studying/reading with any of these, it probably comes down to your kana and kanji level. If this is the case, consider checking out Hiragana42 for your hiragana. If it’s kanji you’re having trouble reading, check out our very own WaniKani. It’s still in beta at the moment of writing this, but if you sign up for the invite list on the homepage you’ll get an invite soon.

So my question to you, is: What beginner’s Japanese reading resources do you use or recommend? Help the Japanese beginners who read this site and give out some of your recommendations in the comments below. If you’re a Japanese beginner you should read these. People often post much smarter things in the comments than I write in the actual article, har.  v(;´༎ຶД༎ຶ`)v

Why I Wrote Hiragana42

If you want to learn Japanese, the most common way to start is with hiragana. I like this method a lot. First, it sets you up to learn good Japanese pronunciation. If you learn hiragana the right way it will do wonders at making you sound more fluent, right from he get-go. Secondly, learning hiragana will make 99% of all Japanese resources and textbooks suddenly usable for you. If you don’t know hiragana you’re missing out on almost everything, which makes it very hard to learn Japanese.

So, I want people to learn hiragana. That’s a given. The problem is that I’ve never thought there was a great way to learn hiragana out there. Most Japanese classes spend at least a month learning hiragana. Even the TextFugu (our Japanese textbook) hiragana method probably takes people a week (though it will be getting a converted version of Hiragana42 pretty soon). I wanted to make something that could teach hiragana to someone in a day or two. With that in mind, Hiragana42 was born.

How Hiragana42 Works

If you’ve used any of our other Japanese-learning resources (especially WaniKani), you’ll know that Tofugu ♥s mnemonics. With kanji, you can’t use image mnemonics. They get too complicated. With kana (like hiragana), images are great. Most kana are pretty simple which means pictures are just what the doctor ordered. Combine that with some text explanation to guide you and you have something that will velcro hiragana to your brain.

“But Koichi!” you say. “There are like three other hiragana textbooks that do exactly this!”

“How astute!” I’d reply. “Did you know there are three of them because you tried them all and they didn’t work?”

“Touché, Koichi, touché. Tell me more about this ‘Hiragana42′ thing.”

“I will, but only after I drink this tea.” *sip sip*

You can’t stop at mnemonics. There is something to be said about exercises and drilling, as long as you’re doing it right. The key to memory isn’t how often you try to push something into your brain. Instead, it’s all about how often you pull that memory out. Have you ever taken an exam in school, only to find that you knew the subject better after the test was over and turned in? That’s because you were pulling information out of your brain, which essentially tells your brain: “Hey, these memories are important because [your name here]-chan is trying to use them more often. I better create better connections to it so it’s easier to recall next time!”

In Hiragana42, there are exercises after you go through 5-10 image mnemonics. There are different exercises after every section is over, but all of them make you recall the information you put into your head using the mnemonics. The mnemonics help you to get to the memory in your head so you don’t have to cheat (cheating doesn’t help you to build a memory at all – struggling to remember, then remembering something is best). As you recall more and more of the kana more and more times over the length of the ebook, you’ll be creating strong hiragana memories in your head. By the end, you’ll be ready to go out into the real world to practice, whether that’s with a Japanese textbook or a Japanese children’s book.

How Fast Can You Learn Hiragana?

If you don’t learn your kana, Awesome Santa will come down your chimney to abduct you (and leave presents behind for NOBODY, BECAUSE YOU WERE ABDUCTED)

That depends on the individual, I’m afraid. My original estimate was one week. Over the last couple weeks I’ve been letting people try it out, though. I got an email yesterday from someone saying they could read all the hiragana in two days. Another person tweeted at me saying he was able to read everything in just a few hours. Many others had similar results, though mileage will vary between individuals. 24 hours is very possible, though, apparently.

Download Hiragana42

Currently, Hiragana42 is available in PDF format. You can download it for free over in Tofugu’s Japanese Resources section (Hiragana42 is here).

I hope you enjoy it and I hope you’re able to learn a lot. Hiragana really is the gateway into learning Japanese, so if you want to learn Japanese this is the place to start.

Feel free to share this ebook as well. The point is to help as many people as possible to learn how to read hiragana so that they’re able ultimately able to learn Japanese. I think a lot of people quit when they see how different and strange hiragana is, so I’m hoping this ebook makes things easier on them.

And yes, for all those who are about to ask… eventually there’ll be a katakana version of this ebook as well. One thing at a time, though! One thing at a time…

Japanese is no different. There are tons and tons of ways to write the same hiragana, katakana, and kanji. You may have heard of “kawaii” handwriting that swept Japan by storm in the 70s, but Japanese goes so much farther than that.

But have you ever seen written Japanese that just looks like a bunch of scribbles (more so than usual)? Let me introduce you to hentaigana and kuzushiji.

Hentaigana

At the core of Japanese there’s hiragana, the basic Japanese alphabet (or syllabary, if you want to be pedantic about it). But it wasn’t until pretty recently that hiragana was standardized. Until the 20th century, people could basically write hiragana however they wanted to.

Those different ways of writing hiragana were called hentaigana (変体仮名). No, not that kind of hentai. In this case, hentai translates to “variant” instead of “pervert,” so hentaigana is “variant kana.” (As far as I know, perverts don’t have their own, special alphabet.)

Can you read this hentaigana? Me neither.

These hentaigana looked like if somebody told you to make hiragana as sloppy and unreadable as humanly possible. They all roughly look like standard hiragana, but if somebody was having a stroke in the middle of writing them.

Fortunately, Japanese went through tons of changes in the early 20th century to streamline and simplify the language to make it more accessible. Since then, hentaigana has fallen out of favor with pretty much everybody. The only real exception are soba shops that want to look all fancy and old-timey.

Kuzushiji

Another way people used to write Japanese was kuzushiji (崩し字 ), which was basically cursive characters. Like hentaigana, kuzushiji looks like what my handwriting would look like if I lost all motor control, but kuzushiji includes more than just hiragana – kanji gets thrown into the mix too.

Interestingly with kuzushiji, the more common a character is, the worse it looks. The logic is that if the character is used often enough, you should be able to recognize it anyway because a lot of people would be writing it this way. Right? Well, maybe not.

So how do you read kuzushiji if you’re not, say, a 18th-century Japanese elite? Fortunately for us there are dictionaries for kuzushiji, along with books that print original literature written in kuzushiji alongside the same text written in standard Japanese.

Handy stuff, especially if you’re a Japanese literature nerd. But if you are familiar with Japanese, then you know how useful context can be in understanding things you don’t know.

For more on kuzushiji, check out this great introduction to kuzushiji.

Kanji Amnesia

It shouldn’t be a surprise that you might not recognize kuzushiji or hentaigana. After all, handwriting has been on a slow and steady decline ever since the invention of the printing press.

If you’re like me, most of the writing you do is either on the computer or cell phone. And in Japan, some people are worried that all this technology is causing people to forget how to write kanji by hand.

This phenomenon of people forgetting how to write kanji is called kanji amnesia or character amnesia, and Koichi wrote about it more in-depth a few years back (and even talked about it on the BBC at about 39:20 in).

What It All Means

Is it a good or bad thing that we don’t have things like hentaigana and kuzushiji around anymore? Well, on one hand you could argue that handwriting is less expressive and individual than it used to be back in the day. Characters have become more standardized and arguably, more boring.

On the other hand, those standardized characters and ways of writing mean that we can actually read what people write instead of having to guess. I’d say that because handwriting is no longer a huge distinguishing part of writing, content becomes more important.

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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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