Lesson 4 - Hiragana

Hiragana is used to write various grammatical markers, inflectional endings and other words not written in Kanji. We can also use hiragana to write entire Japanese sentences - it happens when Kanji characters are very complex or when you don't know how to write something in Kanji. 

We can find 46 hiragana characters for 46 different sounds:

However, we can also find hiragana characters with: 

dakuten ( " ) - used in h, k, s and t kanas

handakuten ( ° ) - used in h kanas

Consonant +  ゃ[ya], ゅ [yu], ょ [yo] 

We can combine consonants with the や [ya], ゆ [yu] and よ [yo] syllables to form a single syllable. This combination is possible when we have:  consonant + i + ya/yu/yo.

For example: ki + ya = kya ;   き + や = きゃ  

Examples of words in hiragana:

さむい (samui) - cold

あめ (ame) - rain

はい (hai) - yes

いいえ (iie) - no