Lesson 11 · Hiragana
が ぎ ぐ げ ご
ざ じ ず ぜ ぞ
The first lesson with no new shapes in it. Ten new sounds, and you can already draw all ten.
Two short strokes at the top right of a character you know change the sound it makes, and nothing else. か becomes が. The mark is called dakuten, and once you have the rule you have twenty characters — ten here, ten in the next lesson.
Scroll
Warm up
All forty-six, twice each. The last time they get a sweep of their own.
The mark
か → が
Two strokes, top right. The shape underneath does not change, the stroke order does not change, and the vowel does not change — only the consonant, which goes from voiceless to voiced. Put a finger on your throat and say ka, then ga: the second one buzzes.
That is the entire rule. K becomes G, S becomes Z, T becomes D, H becomes B. This lesson takes the first two.
K becomes G
- か→が ka → ga
- き→ぎ ki → gi
- く→ぐ ku → gu
- け→げ ke → ge
- こ→ご ko → go
Hard G throughout, as in garden — never the soft G of gentle.
The unvoiced ones are in there too. Listen, then pick.
A key
A key — the kind that opens a door, and also the musical kind.
An egg
An egg. On or in a great deal of what you will order.
S becomes Z
- さ→ざ sa → za
- し→じ shi → ji
- す→ず su → zu
- せ→ぜ se → ze
- そ→ぞ so → zo
Four of them are a plain Z. The fifth is not.
The one that carries its exception over
し was shi, not si — the first exception you met, back in lesson 3. Voicing it keeps the exception: じ is ji, not zi.
じ — ji
The grid keeps its promises even when it breaks them: wherever the plain row bends, the voiced row bends the same way. You will see the same thing happen to ち and つ in the next lesson.
Unvoiced ones mixed in again.
Water
Water. Brought to the table without asking, everywhere, free.
The other script
The characters borrowed from Chinese — the third writing system, and the one you are working towards.
Both rows, paired
Voiced or not
Twenty characters, ten of them marked. The mark is the only difference — hear it, then pick it.
Read them cold
Ten characters, three times each.
Words
Every one unique, and every one voiced somewhere.
Spell every word
Worth knowing
Ten characters for one rule, and the rule was two strokes. That is the shape of everything left in hiragana: no more shapes to learn, only marks and combinations applied to shapes you have.
A detail you will meet constantly. When two words join into one, the second word often picks up a dakuten it did not have alone — it is why ひと and とき can turn up inside longer words as bito and doki. The phenomenon has a name, rendaku, and it is worth knowing only so that a word you half-recognise does not throw you.
Next: だ and ば — T becomes D, H becomes B. That lesson also has the two strangest characters in the syllabary, which sound exactly like two you have just learned.