Lesson 12 · Hiragana
だ ぢ づ で ど
ば び ぶ べ ぼ
The other ten. Same mark, same rule — and two characters you will almost never write.
T becomes D, H becomes B. Nine of these ten behave exactly as the last lesson taught you to expect. The exceptions are ぢ and づ, which sound identical to characters you already know — and that is a fact about the language, not a trick.
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Warm up
Last lesson’s ten, twice each.
T becomes D
- た→だ ta → da
- ち→ぢ chi → ji
- つ→づ tsu → zu
- て→で te → de
- と→ど to → do
Three of them are a plain D. The middle two are the odd ones, and they get a screen to themselves.
The three straightforward ones first.
The two you will rarely write
ぢ sounds exactly like じ. づ sounds exactly like ず. Not nearly — exactly, in every position.
They were four distinct sounds once. Standard Japanese collapsed them into two, and the spelling kept all four characters. So the rule for writing is simple: use じ and ず. You reach for ぢ or づ only when a word visibly comes from one that had ち or つ in it — nose plus blood, to continue from a doubled つ.
You need to read them. You will hardly ever need to choose them.
The body
The body — yours, as a whole.
Telephone
A telephone, and the word for a phone call.
H becomes B
- は→ば ha → ba
- ひ→び hi → bi
- ふ→ぶ fu → bu
- へ→べ he → be
- ほ→ぼ ho → bo
No exceptions in this row at all — even ふ, which was fu rather than hu, comes out as a plain bu.
To eat
To eat. Overdue — you have been able to read a menu for four lessons without being able to say what you do with it.
A bag
A bag — the carried kind, satchel or handbag.
All of them, mixed
Every voiced kana in the syllabary, with its unvoiced partner sitting right beside it in the options. Hearing the mark is the whole skill.
The same set, the other way round
Now the character is the question. Two strokes are all that separate the right answer from a wrong one.
All twenty, typed
ぢ and づ are back in — typing is the one place they are not ambiguous, since you can only be asked to read them, never to pick them out of a sound.
Words
Every one unique.
Spell every word
Worth knowing
Twenty voiced characters across two lessons, and not one new shape among them. Sixty-six of the hiragana now, from forty-six drawings and one mark.
ぢ and づ are worth one last look, because they are the only place the script is genuinely redundant. Two characters, no sound of their own, kept alive by a handful of compound words. Read them when they turn up; write じ and ず otherwise and you will be right essentially always.
You can also now read the sound that gives Japanese its reputation for being polite at volume — だいがく, ぜんぶ, ともだち are ordinary words that were unreadable to you an hour ago.
What is left
One more mark: a small circle instead of two strokes, turning は into pa. Then the small つ, which is a beat of silence rather than a sound, and the combinations — きゃ, きゅ, きょ — which are two characters read as one. After that, hiragana is finished.