Japanese Hiragana & Katakana Chart

こんにちは！ Hello everyone, my name is Yvonne, and I make simple and useful materials for learning Japanese. I am learning Japanese myself, - not fluent in Japanese enough to really be a good teacher, but I would like to help others who are also learning Japanese as well. I will be posting materials that I wish I were provided back when I started studying! 

For the first lesson, I want to cover the most basic aspect of learning Japanese: how to read Hiragana and Katakana (the Kana symbols). 

Hiragana is the most commonly used Japanese characters, used to write native Japanese words or to spell words or part of words that don’t have their own Kanji symbol, and Katakana is used for mostly foreign words, adapted to Japanese from another language. Kanji symbols are the busy looking characters derived from Chinese. 

Both of them are very important to memorize, so please do remember all of them! 

You can start by memorizing the Hiragana first, and slowly learn the Katakana. 

My materials will not have the furigana (smaller kana or syllabic characters, printed next to kanji or other characters to indicate its pronunciation) to force remembering Hiragana and Katakana! 

Download link for the slides: click here

You will see that some characters are repeated, this this time with quotation-mark-looking symbols and a small circle next to it. 

A “ten-ten” mark is basically a single quotation symbol and is added to certain Japanese syllables to make new syllables that sound different. The characters that can have ten-ten are:

- k ⮕ g

    か ka ⮕ が ga

    き ki ⮕ ぎ gi

    く ku ⮕ ぐ gu

    け ke ⮕ げ ge

    こ ko ⮕ ご go

 - s ⮕ z

    さ sa ⮕ ざ za

    し shi ⮕ じ ji

    す su ⮕ ず zu

    せ se ⮕ ぜ ze

    そ so ⮕ ぞ zo

- t ⮕ d

    た ta ⮕ だ da

    ち chi ⮕ ぢ dzi 

    つ tsu ⮕づ dzu

    て te ⮕ で de

    と to ⮕ ど do

- h ⮕ b

    は ha ⮕ ば ba

    ひ hi ⮕ び bi

    ふ fu ⮕ぶ bu

    へ he ⮕ べ be

    ほ ho ⮕ ぼ bo

And it works the same way for katakana too.

Lastly, adding a small degree symbol to the "h-" line makes each one turn into yet new syllables, they turn into "p-" 

- h ⮕ p 

    は ha ⮕ ぱ pa

    ひ hi ⮕ ぴ pi

    ふ fu ⮕ぷ pu

    へ he ⮕ ぺ pe

    ほ ho ⮕ ぽ po

My favorite hiragana and katakana characters are ひ and ロ. Comment below your favorite hiragana and katakana character :)