Hiragana

Hiragana is a syllabary, not an alphabet: each sign is a whole syllable, such as か (ka) or ね (ne), or a vowel on its own, such as あ. There are forty-six basic signs, and with them every Japanese word can be written — which is exactly what books for small children do. In adult writing hiragana does the grammatical work: particles (は, を), the endings of verbs and adjectives (the べます in 食(た)べます), and the many everyday words that are normally written in kana, such as これ or ありがとう.

The signs are arranged in a table of five vowels and ten rows. The vowels always come in the order a, i, u, e, o — あいうえお — and the rows run a, ka, sa, ta, na, ha, ma, ya, ra, wa, with ん at the end. Dictionaries, class lists and indexes are sorted in this order, not in the order of the English alphabet, so it is worth learning the row heads as a sequence. A few signs do not sound quite like their row: し is shi, ち is chi, つ is tsu and ふ is somewhere between fu and hu. They still belong to their rows, and that matters later, when verbs change their endings row by row.

Two small marks extend the table. The dakuten (゛, two short strokes) voices the consonant: か becomes が, さ becomes ざ, た becomes だ, は becomes ば. The handakuten (゜, a small circle) goes only on the h-row and turns it into p: ぱ, ぴ, ぷ. So the h-row comes in three versions, は, ば and ぱ, and an English speaker has to train the eye to see the marks, because they are small and they change the word.

Two things trip English speakers up. The first is reading through romanisation: a learner who leans on ka-ki-ku for long never gets fast at reading kana, and Japanese text is not written in roman letters. The second is three particles that keep an old spelling: the topic particle is pronounced wa but written は, the direction particle is pronounced e but written へ, and the object particle is pronounced o and written を. Elsewhere, wa, e and o are almost always written わ, え and お; the best-known exceptions are greetings such as こんにちは, which end in the old topic particle.