Hiragana

Hiragana is a part of the Japanese writing system. Japanese writing normally consists of kanji which are used for the main words in a sentence, usually content words, and hiragana which are used for the little words that make up the grammar (in English these would be words like “from” and “his”) called particles. Hiragana is also used for the endings of some of the words.

Hiragana is a syllabary, which means that each hiragana character stands for a syllable. It is therefore different from a language such as English which uses an alphabet in which most of the letters stand for one bit of sound (phoneme). There is also another syllabary called katakana which is mostly used for foreign words and names. The two kana systems are quite easy to learn, but kanji takes years of practice. In contrast, the kana systems can be learnt in two weeks.

In the past, hiragana was considered women's writing, while men wrote in kanji. Since kanji are convenient for writing in Chinese but not as convenient for Japanese, it was women, such as Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote the first hiragana books, poems and songs. Later the Buddhist clerics, such as Rennyo (d. 1498), wrote in hiragana to make their religious messages easier to read, so more people could read them.

Sometimes the whole of a text may be written in hiragana to make it easy. This is used in books for young children, or for students starting to learn Japanese, or when writing the lyrics for songs underneath the music where it is important to show how the words fit the music. Some rare or strange kanji may also have so-called furigana characters above it. They are hiragana which show how the kanji is to be pronounced.

In Hiragana each character (kana) is either a vowel (such as "a": あ); a consonant followed by a vowel (such as "ka": か); or, at the end of a syllable, an "n": (ん), although sometimes this sounds more like an “m” or “ng”.

As an example of how the grammatical endings are used we can take the verb “to eat” which is食べる (taberu). Here the main part of the word “eat” (pronounced “ta” in this case) is the kanji 食. The other two syllables: “be-ru” are in hiragana (べる). To say “I ate” or “you ate” etc. you would say “tabemashita”, written食べました (“be-ma-shi-ta” is written in hiragana).