Japanese 1 - Hiragana 1

The Japanese language has three scripts, called hiragana, katakana and kanji.

• Hiragana is mostly used to represent the sounds of originally Japanese words.
• Katakana is mostly used to represent the sounds of foreign words and loanwords.
• Kanji are Chinese characters that represent entire words or word parts.

In this first lesson, you will learn to recognize some hiragana characters. For both hiragana and katakana you will need to learn 46 characters in order to be able to write all syllables.

In the second lesson, you will learn to recognize your first kanji. And then, in the third lesson, you will learn how to make your first sentences in Japanese.

In the table below you can see the hiragana characters that you will learn in this lesson. You don't need to memorize them by looking at the table. To learn them just click the big button below.