Learning the hiragana is the first step to learning Japanese and is an essential prerequisite before studying grammar. It's particularly important because all good Japanese courses will expect you to have at least a general understanding of the characters, and you'll need to know the hiragana in order to read Japanese texts, or explore good learning materials.

The good news is that hiragana is much simpler than the Alphabet. It contains less unique sounds and pronunciation generally stays consistent - meaning you can read most words exactly as they are spelt.

It's more than possible to learn the hiragana in a matter of days to a week depending upon how much time you invest each day.

In this section we will take a brief look at the entire Hiragana before moving on to learning the hiragana characters in groups. Each lesson will introduce several characters, with audio, exercises and some optional vocabulary using the Hiragana you've learned so far.

The Hiragana Vowels

The hiragana contains 5 vowels:

Their pronunciation follows:
あ: 'a' as in 'apple'
い: is more like 'ee' as in week.
う: 'u' as in 'umbrella'
え: 'e' as in 'egg'
お: 'o' as in 'on'

As we can see above, the hiragana character あ represents the phonetic "a" sound in Japanese. There are 46 standard Hiragana characters to learn, plus 25 dakuten - which are diacritic signs added to certain characters, similar to accents. These dakuten are added to some unvoiced consonants in order to tell you to voice it. For example, the k consonant is unvoiced - you don't use your vocal cords when

How well do I need to know The Hiragana?

A common question new students of Japanese have - is how much time they need to spend on the hiragana before progressing to learn grammar?

This question has no objectively correct answer. We would advise that you have at least a general understanding of the characters before progressing, but you don't need to know them fluently unless you want to. This is because repeated exposure to the characters during grammar lessons will further cement the characters in your head and help you to remember them.

Lesson Structure

We've grouped the Hiragana into groups of 5 characters - in each lesson you'll study these 5 characters using a collection of exercises.

Alongside the exercises, you'll find a vocabulary list that uses the characters we've covered so far. You'll also find some exercises to help you learn these words. While the vocabulary sections are optional, it's recommended that you learn at least a few words in each chapter to help reinforce the hiragana characters and to give yourself a starting vocabulary.

Some lessons might include a sub-section called "Dakuten". Certain hiragana characters have a dakuten, which looks like a small quotation mark next to the character - you could liken them to accents in romance languages. Characters with a dakuten have a slightly different pronunciation to their standard counterparts.