Hiragana Gotcha’s

If you want to learn to read Japanese, you need to start with Hiragana. Hiragana is a 46 character alphabet composed of simple and curved characters. We can arrange this alphabet into a grid of vowel-consonant pairs. There are 5 vowel characters in Hiragana and 9 consonants.

Hiragana Chart

There are obstacles that make this alphabet more complicated than the Latin alphabet. You can’t learn these 46 characters and know hiragana. This post details those tricky extras that make up advanced hiragana.

Digraphs

Digraphs, are when you join any of the hiragana from the “I” column to a lowercase character from the “Y” row.

Hiragana chart with highlighted digraph characters

The lowercase “Y” consonants are smaller so they can be tricky.

や ゃ

よ ょ

ゆ ゅ

This lowercase form is the difference between:

“Hiya” and “hya” — ひや and ひゃ

“Hiyo” and “hyo” — ひよ and ひょ

“Hiyu” and “hyu” — ひゆ and ひゅ

To practice the pronunciation here, try saying “hiya” as fast as possible. Be as lazy as you can…