Hiragana: the complete chart, and how to actually learn it

The hiragana chart

The grid below is the gojūon, the order Japanese itself is indexed in. Five vowels run across; consonants run down. Read it as a system rather than a list: か is k + a, き is k + i, and so on all the way down. Learn the five vowels properly and most of the chart becomes arithmetic.

The 46 basic hiragana in gojūon order. Gaps are sounds that no longer exist in modern Japanese.

Two characters behave differently from the rest. を is pronounced o and is only ever used as a grammatical particle, never inside a word. ん is the only kana that is a consonant on its own, and it borrows its sound from whatever follows it — n before t and d, m before p and b, ng before k and g. You do not have to decide which; your mouth does it for you.

Start with the five vowels

Almost every kana is one consonant plus one of five vowels, so these five sounds do most of the work in the language. Keep each one short and flat — Japanese does not glide from one vowel into another the way English does.

• あ a — an open “ah”, as in father. Never the a of cat.
• い i — “ee” as in see, clipped short.
• う u — “oo” as in food, but with the lips flat rather than rounded.
• え e — “eh” as in bed. It does not glide into a y sound.
• お o — “oh” as in more, cut off before the w.

One more habit worth building on day one: every kana is one beat, and every beat is the same length. か-さ is two even beats, not a stressed one and a weak one. English stress is the hardest habit to drop and the fastest thing to fix.

The hiragana that look alike

A handful of pairs cause most of the hesitation beginners feel, and they are worth learning as pairs, deliberately, once. Learn the difference and you stop losing time to it every time you read.

The katakana look-alikes are worse — シ and ツ in particular — and they are covered on the katakana page.

Read real words as early as you can

Recognition becomes permanent when it happens inside a real word rather than on a flashcard. These are all written in hiragana alone, so you can read every one of them with the chart above. Try each before you look at the reading.

Notice what the harder ones are teaching you: がっこう has a silent held beat and a long vowel; じてんしゃ ends in a contracted sound. Those two features account for most early misreadings.