Lesson 15 · Hiragana
ぎゃ ぎゅ ぎょ
じゃ びゃ ぴゃ
The last twelve. After this there is no hiragana you cannot read.
Same rule as last lesson, applied to the marked characters. Every one of these is a combination you already know sitting on a character you already know — and then one convention that has been quietly at work since lesson 6.
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Warm up
Last lesson's twenty-one, once each.
The marked ones combine too
- ぎ+ゃ→ぎゃ gya
- じ+ゃ→じゃ ja
- び+ゃ→びゃ bya
- ぴ+ゃ→ぴゃ pya
Four characters, three small ones each. Twelve, and no surprises except one.
The last exception in hiragana
し was shi. じ was ji. しゃ was sha. So じゃ is ja — not zya.
じゃ — ja as in jam.
That is the fourth time the same two rows have bent, and the last. From here the syllabary is regular.
Long vowels
You have been reading these since lesson 6 without being told the rule. A long vowel is written by adding a kana, and which kana is a convention rather than a sound.
- おう long o
- えい long e
- うう long u
A long O is usually おう — とうきょう, がっこう, ぼうし. A long E is usually えい — せんせい, とけい. Neither adds a syllable; both add a beat.
The exceptions are worth knowing by sight rather than by rule: おおきい is a long O written with お, and there are only a handful like it.
Potato
Potato. Starts with the exception.
Hospital
A hospital. Four characters, a combination and a long vowel.
Words
Every one unique.
Spell every word
That is all of hiragana
A hundred and four sounds, from forty-six shapes, two marks and one combining rule. There is no hiragana left to learn.
Worth being precise about what that means. You can now decode any hiragana on any page — sound it out, correctly, at whatever speed you can manage. You cannot yet read Japanese, because real text mixes in katakana and kanji, and because decoding is not comprehension. But the thing that made Japanese look like an undifferentiated wall is gone.
What Bunpo is for now
Its kana lessons are revision rather than instruction, so let it carry grammar and vocabulary from here. Bring anything that does not make sense back to this workspace and we will build a lesson on it.
One lesson left here: no new characters, just reading something.