Making Sense of Japanese Verbs

Japanese language, like any language, uses verbs a lot. But verbs in Japanese differ considerably from Indo-European languages in how verbs are constructed, conjugated and so on. This makes them pretty tricky to learn at first glance, but the good news is that the internal structure and logic is actually fairly straightforward. You just need to unlearn your native language to avoid casual mistakes.

Warning: This post assumes you can read hiragana script. Hiragana takes a bit of work upfront, but you can master it quickly, and be reading Japanese fairly well after that (kanji notwithstanding). You can see my articles here, here and here about it.

The first thing to understand is that Japanese, especially in conversation, has a lot of implicit and contextual meaning. So, you can leave out many parts of speech because it’s already implied, or you just know from the context. But usually a sentence needs at least a verb.

A: [did you eat?]

B: ん、たべた
(yeah, I ate)

This is a perfectly normal sentence in conversation. No subject, object or anything, just the verb (to eat, past-tense).

Also, as I alluded to earlier, the conjugations and usages differ from European languages. Let’s look at some examples. This chart doesn’t cover everything but covers some of the most essential forms.

Conjugation	Usage	Example “Godan” Verb : 読む・よむ	Example “Ichidan” Verb : 食べる・たべる
Dictionary form	Dictionary listing of verb, also used for subordinate clauses, recurring actions (e.g. I eat X daily), and also future tense!	読む・よむ	食べる・たべる
Polite form	Used in polite, formal speech, especially at work, talking to teachers, or one’s elders. Also used for future tense!	読みます・よみます	食べます・たべます
“Te” form	Extremely useful. Links verbs together in sequence, or allows for other grammatical forms.	読んで・よんで	食べて・たべて
Simple Past	Casual, past tense form. Similar to dictionary form, but expresses past tense.	読んだ・よんだ	食べた・たべた
Passive form	When something is being done to you. (e.g. I am being eaten)	読まれる・よまれる	食べられる・たべられる

Note that I divided verbs by Go-dan (五段), and Ichi-dan (一段) verbs. This is important as each one has a slightly different conjugation process. Ichi-dan verbs, sometimes called “ru-verbs” because the dictionary form always ends in る “ru”, however not all verbs that end in る are ichi-dan verbs. Everything else are go-dan verbs because the dictionary form has five (“go”) possible endings: う “u”, つ “tsu”, る “ru”, ぬ “nu”, and む “mu”.

Speaking from personal experience, people who are first learning Japanese often learn the textbook polite form since they’re talking with other adults, and don’t want to be rude.

However, it’s far more useful to learn the dictionary form and the “te”-form. The dictionary form is useful form many grammatical forms, and for more complex sentence. Note to mention it also expresses future tense in the right context. Similarly, the “te” form is the base of many other grammatical forms.

To conjugate the “te”-form from the dictionary form, change the verb endings like so:

Dictionary Verb ending	Becomes…	Example before	Example after
う (u)	って (tte)	言う・いう (iu)	言って・いって (itte)
つ (tsu)	って (tte)	持つ・もつ (motsu)	持って・もって (motte)
る (ru)	って (tte)	切る・きる (kiru)	切って・きって (kitte)
る (ru), ichidan	て (te)	食べる・たべる (taberu)	食べて・たべて (tabete)
く (ku)	いて (ite)	書く・かく (kaku)	書いて・かいて (kaite)
ぐ (gu)	いで (ide)	急ぐ・いそぐ (isogu)	急いで・いそいで (isoide)
む (mu)	んで (nde)	読む・よむ (yomu)	読んで・よんで (yonde)

Similarly for the simple past tense, just change the “te” to “ta” like so:

Dictionary Verb ending	Becomes…	Example before	Example after
う (u)	った (tta)	言う・いう (iu)	言って・いった (itta)
つ (tsu)	った (tta)	持つ・もつ (motsu)	持って・もった (motta)
る (ru)	った (tta)	切る・きる (kiru)	切って・きった (kitta)
る (ru), ichidan	た (ta)	食べる・たべる (taberu)	食べて・たべた (tabete)
く (ku)	いた (ita)	書く・かく (kaku)	書いて・かいた (kaita)
ぐ (gu)	いだ (ida)	急ぐ・いそぐ (isogu)	急いで・いそいだ (isoida)
む (mu)	んだ (nda)	読む・よむ (yomu)	読んで・よんだ (yonda)

Using these simple tricks, you can do more complex forms, like converting a passive form verb to past-tense (i.e. the sushi is being eaten -> the sushi was eaten), and so on.

In fact, I believe when learning Japanese verbs, it’s best to record and list them like so:

dictionary-form, te-form

examples:
読む、読んで
食べる、食べて
切る、切って
着る、着て

This not only helps you memorize the basic grammatical forms, but helps you remember if it is an ichidan verb vs. godan verb. “By their te-form, ye shall know them…“¹

Anyhow, that’s a brief look at Japanese verbs. It’s not necessary to learn all the forms and applications at first, but a good way to build solid fundamentals and branch into more advanced lessons more seamlessly.

Good luck and happy studying!

¹ This was a trick, not to mention a joke, I learned recently while studying classic, Koine Greek. Nouns are recorded as a combination of nominative + genitive forms, while Greek verbs are listed by principal parts. There’s no reason why Japanese language tools can do the same, but I don’t see books really doing this. That’s a shame. Greek and Latin have been scrutinized and studied for centuries in the West, so the teaching tools and methods are very mature. Japanese language studies in the West are much newer, and lacking many of these handy mnemonics, tools, etc.

Understanding Japanese Kanji

The kanji poster hanging in my son’s room since he was a little boy, product by Kumon.

The Japanese writing system is … complicated.

Japanese as a language isn’t particularly difficult, no more or less than other languages, but its writing system demands considerable time and investment to really get comfortable with. Written Japanese comprises of a mix of a few different things:

Hiragana syllabary¹ – This is the default way of writing Japanese, and what most people, including kids in Japan, learn first. Note that hiragana characters are “syllables” not letters. One sound equals one hiragana character.
Katakana syllabary¹ – The katakana is a 1:1 analogue to hiragana. In other words, every hiragana character has a corresponding character in katakana, but katakana looks more “blockey”, less flowing, than hiragana. It is most often used with foreign words, Buddhist mantras, or just for impact (e.g. sound-effect words in manga).
Chinese characters – Also known as kanji.

A typical sentence might look like: 今日はズボンを買った。Everything in blue is kanji, everything in red is katakana, while everything else is hiragana. I’ve spoken about the hiragana syllabary (part 1, 2 and 3) already, and katakana is similar enough that it does not require a separate article. So, today we’re just covering the use of Chinese characters or kanji.

Historically, China’s neighbors, such as Korea, Japan and Vietnam spoke languages that are both very different than Chinese, yet they wanted to import Chinese technology and culture. When they imported the Chinese writing system, however, it wasn’t an simple fit. Native words sound very different than Chinese, and sounds in Chinese language don’t always exist in the native language. Thus, Chinese characters’ sounds change when they’re imported.

Returning to Japanese language, the word for Japan in Chinese characters is 日本. In modern, Mandarin Chinese this is pronounced as rì běn, but in Japanese it’s pronounced as either nippon or nihon.² This YouTube video helps illustrate the process:

You can see how the process of importing Chinese characters into Japanese was very organic. The result is that there are often many ways to read a Japanese kanji character, depending on whether it’s read in a native Japanese way, in a Sinified (Chinese) way.

The native way, or kun-yomi, is most often used for standalone words (not compound words), people’s names, place names, and verbs. For example, the kanji 山 is read as yama in the native way. When talking about a mountain, or in someone’s name such as Sugiyama, you would most likely see this native pronunciation.

However, the Sinified reading of this kanji is san or zan . This is the on-yomi reading, which you might see in a compound word like 登山 (tozan) for mountain climbing. It’s the same kanji character, but now it’s read as “zan” instead of native “yama”.

If you look at my son’s kanji poster above, you can see for each kanji there is a mix of kun-yomi readings and on-yomi readings. Some kanji (夕) have maybe only one reading. Some (下) have seven or more! It all depends on how it was imported into Japanese, and how it’s applied in the language over the centuries.

So, inevitably the Japanese language student asks: how am I going to learn all this kanji?!

Short answer is: you don’t.

Beyond maybe the first 100 kanji, the amount of time and effort to memorize the kanji rapidly becomes untenable, and you get diminishing returns. How many kanji have an on-yomi of shō ? A lot, too many to remember which is which. Also, the further along you go, the more obscure and specific kanji get, so the returns worsen over time. They’re important, but show up in increasingly specific contexts.

Further, using mnemonics or pictures to learn the kanji is only useful when the kanji actually looks like something, which is mostly the basic kanji only. The aforementioned 夕 does look like a moon at evening, so mnemonics work. But what about 優?³

Don’t get me started on the Heisig method. It’s a useful way for learning how to break down Kanji into discrete bits, but beyond that it doesn’t provide much value for the amount of work required.

No, the only way to learn kanji is to not learn them individually.

Instead, focus on building your vocabulary, and learn the kanji as they come up. I talked about this a while back as the “convergence method” but there’s no magic here. As you learn more vocabulary words, certain kanji come up often, and you’ll learn to anticipate their readings in future words. Sometimes you get it wrong, and that’s OK, other times you nail it perfectly.

But there is one other feature of Japanese you should leverage often: furigana.

Furigana is a reading aid often used for younger readers, and for language students by putting reading hints just above the kanji characters. For example lets look at the sentence above now using furigana: 今日きょうはズボンを買かった。

This is much easier to read. It still flows nicely in Japanese, but now we have the pronunciation hints (written in hiragana) right above each kanji.

If you find yourself embarrassed for relying on furigana, don’t be. This is how grade-school kids in Japan learn to read. This is how my kids (bi-racial Japanese-American) here in the US learned to read Japanese. In time, after seeing the same word 50 times, the reader doesn’t even need the furigana anymore, and can read without it, but it helps smooth the transition. When I was learning to ride a bike as a kid, I relied on training wheels, but as my confidence grew, I could ride without using them. The training wheels were still there, but I was riding more and more steady, so I hardly noticed when my dad took them off.

So, the key to reading Japanese well, including kanji, is to read native media that uses furigana. Many manga for younger audiences (including my favorite Splatoon manga), use furigana for all kanji characters and it makes the process of reading, plus looking up unfamiliar words, much easier. Even adult media uses furigana to help with more advanced, obscure words.

The point of all this is that learning kanji isn’t a slog of memorizing hundreds or thousands of characters, it’s more about learning to read vocabulary, preferably using native media. The latter approach is way more fun, and actually provides value in the long-run versus memorizing a bunch of kanji in isolation, then forgetting everything.

Chinese characters are great, and convey a lot of things that alphabetic systems can’t, but they are also pretty complicated and require considerably more ramp-up time.

P.S. if you use WordPress, this is how you add furigana to your Japanese text.

¹ These are syllabary, not alphabets, because each character represents a full syllable, not a single consonant or vowel.

² Side note, 日本 was used in other countries, like Korea and Vietnam, and their pronunciation differed too. Korean language pronounces it as Ilbon, while in Vietnam it’s Nhật Bản.

³ Confusingly enough, same pronunciation as 夕, by the way.

Rhythm in Japanese Language

Japanese language, on its own terms, isn’t that difficult a language to learn I believe, but it does have some things that are pretty different from English, and require re-learning. One of them, surprisingly, is rhythm and lack of stress accents. I’ve talked about the “flat” sound of Japanese, but I haven’t really talked about its rhythm before.

Since Japanese is usually written using hiragana syllabary, it’s important to note that each kana “letter” is actually a self-contained syllable, and represents one “beat”. So, if you take a word like the city of Yokohama, it has four beats:

よ	こ	は	ま
Yo	ko	ha	ma

Once you grasp this concept, and get familiar with hiragana, Japanese is fairly easy to spell. However, there is one wrinkle that’s really important to pay attention to.

In Japanese the letters ō and o are not the same. They both sound like “oh”, but one of them is two beats, and the other is a single beat. In Romanization, the sound ō is actually two beats, comprising of o, followed by u “ooh”. Many words in Japanese use this combination. For example, the city of Tokyo, is actually Tōkyō. If pronounced correctly, it actually has 4 beats, not 2:

と	う	きょ	う
To	u	kyo	u

It really helps if you clap to the beat to help you adjust to this. For a native English speaker, it’s really hard to tell the difference between ō and o in conversation, but a native Japanese speaker can and does. A good example is the word ryokō (旅行, “travel”) which has both:

りょ	こ	う
ryo	ko	u

The “ryo” is pronounced as a single beat (not 2, as in English), while the kō is pronounced as two beats.

In Japanese, the ū and u, both pronounced as “ooh” as in “soup” similarly are distinguished by two beats vs. one. The word for shumi (趣味, “hobby”) has only two beats:

しゅ	み
shu	mi

But compare with shūmatsu (週末, “weekend”) which has two beats for shū (4 total):

しゅ	う	ま	つ
shu	u	ma	tsu

This is also why relying on Romanization of Japanese is a bad idea: it’s hard to convey this. IF you can read hiragana, then the pronunciation is super obvious because it’s a WYSIWYG writing system: what you see is what you get. Take this book cover for example (which I talk about in my other blog):

I’ve highlighted in green the interesting characters. The word 百 is pronounced as ひゃく which is two beats:

ひゃ	く
hya	ku

And the word 道 in this context is pronounced as しゅ (shu) which is a single beat, like English “shoe”. Romanization can convey this, but if you can read hiragana, it is just so much easier.

Slight tangent, but Korean Hangeul works much the same way: Romanization doesn’t convey the sounds very well, but like Japanese hiragana, native Hangeul is also a WYSIWYG system. My wife and I have a children’s book in Korean from a friend:

I’ve highlighted each Hangeul syllable, but as you can see, Hangeul neatly divides each syllable by blocks anyway. Thus, you can easily tell who to read each one:

선	래	동	화
seon	rae	dong	hwa

If you try to write the title in Romanized Korean: seonraedonghwa, it’s hard to distinguish syllables. Is “seon” actually “se” and “on”, or is it one syllable? If you write with spaces in between words, it’s still hard to tell what’s what.

Also, this need to learn the native script isn’t limited to Asian languages. Ukrainian is much easier to read and learn once you grasp the Cyrillic alphabet. It is a pain upfront due to overlap with English, but it also makes it much easier to read words like the surname of the current president: Зеленський. In Ukrainian, there is only one way to read/pronounce Зеленський, but in Romanized Ukrainian it is written as Zelenskyy, Zelensky or Zelenskiy. Close, but not quite. The same goes with reading Greek (both modern and ancient), and so on.

Think of learning Hiragana, Hangeul, Cyrillic, Devanagari, or Greek as a one-time investment. It seems like a hassle upfront, but once you get past that barrier, a whole new world opens up.

Anyhow, back to the original point of this post. When it comes to learning Japanese, it’s important to pay attention to rhythm, because your pronunciation will sound much better, and you’re likely to reduce your foreign “stress” accent in the process. It’s perfectly fine to have some lingering accent (that’s life as a foreigner in any country), but your ability to clearly convey what you want to say to native speakers will go a lot smoother, and be less tiring to the listener.

Good luck!

Part Three: Learning Hiragana Ain’t Hard!

In lesson one we covered basic concepts of Japanese hiragana writing and in lesson two we covered some more advanced features. Today, we’ll focus more on how to learn hiragana.

If you’re studying Japanese, hiragana is a “learn once, learn early, use often” feature of the language. The sooner you make the leap, the better. I often meet beginning Japanese students who lament having to learn the 40+ characters (and the modifications), but once you’ve broken past that barrier, a lot of things open up in Japanese. Yes you need kanji (Chinese characters too), but with hiragana, you can’t even begin to read. Even if you know only 50-100 Chinese characters, as long as you know hiragana script, you’ll have a much easier time in Japan.

I have dabbled in a number of languages over the years including Sanskrit, Korean, Ukrainian, ancient Greek, and of course Japanese, and each one requires learning a new script, but there are certain patterns in study that help to adapt to a new script relatively quickly:

Read – reading words is the best way to get familiar with a new script. If you find example words, or example sentences, read them, pick them apart in your mind and figure out how to pronounce it. It’s a fun mental exercise, but also it just gets easier and easier over time.
Write – writing isn’t as useful as reading a new script, but it’s a good skill to adopt early to develop good habits, especially good handwriting.

I often see new students try to learn reading and writing at the same time, but it becomes a drag, and people get discouraged. I believe they are two important, but not necessarily related skills, and of the two, reading is the one you should prioritize first with writing as a close second.

Further, people will spend money on smartphone apps to practice their handwriting, but they don’t really seem to accurate capture the motor skills necessary to write. Instead, it would be better to download and print Japanese essay paper (genkōyōshi 原稿用紙) and just use that instead.¹ Just do an image search for 原稿用紙 and you’ll see plenty of options.

One of my favorite sources for me to practice reading Japanese hiragana was the Graded Reader series by White Rabbit Press. These are now available as smart-phone apps, but I used them back when they were just printed books, and starting with the lowest level, I soon found I could follow the hiragana well enough.

From there, I delved into Japanese manga, and watching TV. Neither was easy, but it didn’t take long to pick out and get used to the hiragana because they’re just so consistent.

As for writing, there are many such workbooks available, but I liked Kodansha’s Hiragana Workbook: A Step-By-Step Approach to Basic Japanese Writing. However, other such books are probably just as good.

Once you’ve gotten use to hiragana, learning katakana is worth investing the time, but don’t be afraid to branch out into kanji either. I’ll cover that in a future post.

Good luck! がんばって！

¹ Quick reminder: Japanese is often written from top to bottom, and right to left. This will make more sense if you use proper Japanese-style practice paper.

Part Two: Learning Hiragana Ain’t Hard!

In part one we covered the basics of how Japanese Hiragana script works. In this post we’ll cover some of the more advanced concepts.

First let’s review the basic hiragana characters:

n	w	r	y	m	h	n	t	s	k	(blank)
ん	わ	ら	や	ま	は	な	た	さ	か	あ	a
		り		み	ひ	に	ち	し	き	い	i
		る	ゆ	む	ふ	ぬ	つ	す	く	う	u
		れ		め	へ	ね	て	せ	け	え	e
	を	ろ	よ	も	ほ	の	と	そ	こ	お	o

As we talked about last time, each hiragana “letter” is actually a syllable, you combine the consonant at the top with a vowel on the right to get the right kana syllable. The only exception was the final “n” sound ん.

Further, some of the characters can be modified to make somewhat different sounds. For example the “K” column above becomes a “G” column if you add ゛(double ticks) to the characters. か (ka) becomes が (ga) and き (ki) becomes ぎ (gi) and so on. Only certain columns above can be modified this way: the “K”, “S”, “T” and “H” columns.

Further, there is one other column to learn and that is the “P” column which is formed by taking the “H” column and adding a small circle ゜for sounds like ぱ (pa), ぴ (pi), ぺ (pe) and so on.

Together these look like so:

b	d	z	g		p
ば	だ	ざ	が	a	ぱ
び	ぢ*	じ*	ぎ	i	ぴ
ぶ	づ*	ず	ぐ	u	ぷ
べ	で	ぜ	げ	e	ぺ
ぼ	ど	ぞ	ご	o	ぽ

There are three characters to note here:

じ is pronounced as “ji”. This kinds of makes sense when you compare the “S” column as a whole with the “Z” column.
づ is pronounced as “dzu” or “zu” but is not commonly used. Again, this kind of makes sense when seen as a whole.
ぢ is pronounced something like “dzi” or “ji”, but is even less commonly used.

Mini Hiragana

A few hiragana characters can be miniaturized to modify other hiragana. Namely や (ya) ゆ (yu) and よ (yo) which become ゃゅ and ょ. Literally, they’re a half-size smaller. How are they applied?

Think of the Japanese sound “sho”. You might be tempted to write it as しよ, but since hiragana are typically “what you see is what you get”, the end result would be “shiyo”, not “sho”. And yes, in Japanese there is a difference. A native speaker would have no trouble discerning the difference.

So, the key is to use the mini version of よ, ょ, as in しょ. Note that しよ and しょ look pretty similar, and depending on the typeface used a book or online, it can be pretty hard to tell the difference. Time and practice reading will help here, plus as you gain more experience with Japanese the context will obviously point to one or the other.

In any case, other sound combinations that can be made with these “mini hiragana” are sho, shu, sha, jo, ju, ja,¹ kyo, kyu, kya, gyo, gyu, gya, hyo, hyu, hya and so on.

Note that these are treated as a single syllable in Japanese, not two syllables. This is important when correctly pronouncing Japanese personal names like Ryo. It is a single syllable, so instead of saying “ree-yoh” or “rye-yoh”, it condenses together into just one syllable: “ryo”. Westerners have to take care when pronouncing such sounds to avoid making two syllables. Practice makes perfect! 🙂

Speaking of two syllable-sounds, the ゅ (yu) and ょ (yo) mini-hiragana will also be frequently followed by う (u) as a way to lengthen the sound. This is something inherent in Japanese language where the “u” and “o” vowels sounds are often lengthened. This counts a two syllables or two “beats” of sound. So, using the example of the capitol of Japan, Tokyo, it is pronounced as four syllables: とうきょう (to u kyo u). Sometimes this extra “u” is written in Romaji as either “ou”, “uu” or “ō” and “ū”.

Also, be warned that not all “u” and “o” vowel sounds do this. The word りょこう (ryokou, “travel”) for example. The first syllable has no trailing “u”, while the second does.

Finally, there is the mini っ (tsu). Unlike normal つ, it actually has *no* pronunciation as such. Instead, it is frequently used to put a brief pause between syllables. The only equivalent in English this author is aware of is the double-k in “bookkeeping”.

Interestingly, the small っ does actually count as a syllable for the purposes of rhythm and spelling even if it doesn’t have a sound, and therefore it does change the spelling of words. Compare sekai せかい (world) with sekkai せっかい (incision). These are two entirely separate words, but the only spelling difference is the small っ. For the purposes of spelling and pronunciation, the word せかい has 3 betas, while せっかい has 4 beats and pronounced as “se (pause) ka i”.

In part three, we’ll talk more about how to get used to hiragana and ways to improve your reading skills.

For now, try reading these words:

しょうぎ – Japanese chess
きょうと – the old capitol of Japan
えんぴつ – pencil
ひゃく – hundred
ざぜん – sitting meditation (namely “Zen”)
きょうそう – a foot race
えんじる – to act (e.g. theater)
しょうが – ginger
けっかく – tuberculosis
しょっぱい – salty

Good luck!

¹ This leads to an interesting problem in romanization. In one romanization scheme, these are written as syo, syu, sya, jyo, jyu, jya which is more “Japanese”. In another scheme, sho, shu, sha, jo, ju, ja which is more “English”. You may see one other the other, so be aware. 🙂

Part One: Learning Hiragana Ain’t Hard!

Recently a colleague expressed interest in learning Japanese language and asked me for advice. I’ve been learning Japanese on my own for about 10 years ever since I married my wife, and have reached a point that, while certainly not fluent, I can still read Japanese without too much difficulty.

Japanese language seems difficult at first, but isn’t nearly as hard as it looks. It’s different, but it has its own internal logic that, once you get the hang of, isn’t really any harder than any other language. Japanese is different, not hard.

The first thing to wrap your head around is the hiragana writing system. Hiragana is oftentimes the first thing kids in Japan (or my own kids here) learn to read. Technically speaking hiragana is not an alphabet but a syllabary. This means that syllables in the Japanese language¹ are usually expressed as a single “letter” or symbol. か always reads as “ka” and め always reads as “me” and so on.

Typically they’re arranged in a simple grid like so:

n	w	r	y	m	h	n	t	s	k	(blank)
n	wa	ra	ya	ma	ha	na	ta	sa	ka	a	a
		ri		mi	hi	ni	chi	shi	ki	i	i
		ru	yu	mu	hu	nu	tsu	su	ku	u	u
		re		me	he	ne	te	se	ke	e	e
	wo	ro	yo	mo	ho	no	to	so	ko	o	o

Kids in Japan (as well as my kids here) learn this table by starting from upper-right, reading vertically.

Here, you can see that the letters are formed by some combination of a consonant (the top row), and a vowel sound. ま is “ma” or “m” + “a”, for example. The only exception is ん which is just the final “n” sound for other syllables. It is never used at the beginning of a word.

There’s even a row for no-consonants for “a”, “i”, “u”, “e” and “o”. You can see that overall there’s a logical pattern to the setup though there are a few exceptions. First “tu” becomes “tsu” and “ti” becomes “chi”, while “si” becomes “shi”. These are probably just natural sound evolutions.

Another thing to notice is that a few spots are blank. These often refer to sounds that are archaic and don’t exist anymore, or to sounds that just never existed.

Now, if we replace the table above with that actual hiragana…

n	w	r	y	m	h	n	t	s	k	(blank)
ん	わ	ら	や	ま	は	な	た	さ	か	あ	a
		り		み	ひ	に	ち	し	き	い	i
		る	ゆ	む	ふ	ぬ	つ	す	く	う	u
		れ		め	へ	ね	て	せ	け	え	e
	を	ろ	よ	も	ほ	の	と	そ	こ	お	o

So, reading a phrase like:

にほんのなつはあつい
ni hon no na tsu wa atsui

This translates as “Japanese summers are hot” is as simple as reading each hiragana character and pronouncing its sound.

WYSIWYG: What you see is what you get!

Wait, what about は ? It’s supposed to read as “ha”, not “wa”! This is one of the rare exceptions to hiragana rules. When は is used to mark the subject, it’s read as “wa”. Otherwise, it’s “ha”. That’s the only such exception you have to remember. Interestingly, in modern Japanese, を (wo) is never used except as a marker for direct objects. Otherwise, you never see it.

In part two, we’ll cover some additional details to round out the lesson.

For now, try reading these words and places:

みかん – satsuma orange
すし – sushi
よこはま – city in Japan
なら – another city in Japan
くつ – shoe (or shoes)
ほとけ – a Buddha (not to be confused with the historical Buddha named “Shakyamuni”)
くるま – car
かるた – a fun game that many people in Japan play ( and some overseas ).

Hiragana may seem daunting at first, but because it’s so consistent, it’s something that you learn once, but use constantly in Japanese.

Good luck!

¹ Which is easier than some other languages. Japanese has relatively fewer “sounds” than some languages which is part of the reason why it struggles to pronounce foreign words.

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