Learn Hiragana: An Easy Beginner's Guide - Busuu (2024)

Looking for the best way to learn hiragana? You’ve come to the right place. We’ve got a handy hiragana chart and a great trick to lock these oh-so-important Japanese characters into your memory for good.

But first, what is hiragana?

Hiragana is one of the three Japanese alphabets, or writing systems.

Hiragana is the first alphabet that children and students of Japanese learn to read and write, and it’s very widely used in Japan. A basic understanding of hiragana is practically necessary just to start learning Japanese! If you want to use Japanese textbooks and workbooks, you’ll need to be able to read hiragana to get started.

But, fortunately, it’s really very easy to learn. You can learn hiragana in just a week (or even a day or two, if you’re ready to buckle down!).

A closer look at hiragana (and your handy hiragana chart)

Hiragana has 46 basic characters, each representing a key sound or syllable. Beyond that, it includes a few transformations – called dakuten, handakuten, and combinations – that tweak those basic characters in order to cover the full range of sounds you’ll need to speak Japanese like a pro. But we’ll start with the basic characters and get into the transformations later.

When we learn hiragana, we start with the 5 vowels – ‘a’ (あ), ‘i’ (い), ‘u’ (う), ‘e’ (え), and ‘o’ (お),pronounced like ‘ah’, ‘ee’, ‘ooh’, ‘eh’ and ‘oh’.

After that, each subsequent row is sorted by the consonant sound they’re paired with, in the order of those 5 vowels. So, for example, after ‘a’, ‘i’, ‘u’, ‘e’, ‘o’, we learn ‘ka’, ‘ki’, ‘ku’, ‘ke’, ‘ko’, then ‘sa’, ‘si’, ‘su’, ‘se’, ‘so’ and so on and so forth.