¤ Hiragana Chart ¤

mteric

If you're new to Japanese, one of the first things you'll want to learn is the Hiragana and the Katakana.  These are basic sets of characters used to represent syllables, the sounds of the spoken language.  The Hiragana is used to write words or particles native to Japanese, whereas the Katakana is used to write foreign words.  For example, words borrowed from English would be written in Katakana.

Edit: I've removed the Hiragana chart I tried to put in this post, as the formatting didn't turn out as nicely as I'd hoped.  But this link has everything you could want to know and more:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana

Also, I thought I'd post this other link, which gives you useful (and often times amusing) mnemonics for memorizing the symbols:

http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/nihongo/contents.html

SallyDP · Active Poster Joined: 16 Mar 2007 Posts: 100

Thank you so much! Years ago I took one semester of Japanese. It was a summer class and I remember I had to learn Hiragana. My teacher said I was pretty good at it! But I only took that class. And then forgot everything about it.

mteric

That's cool! I'll bet it would come back to you fairly quickly, if you were to start learning it again.