Lesson 16 · Hiragana
Reading
No new characters. This lesson is here to prove the last fifteen worked.
Five rounds, cold and without hints — three by class, then the same characters mixed together, which is harder and is the point. After that, five sentences of Japanese with nothing removed to make them easier. If you get through this you are done with hiragana.
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The forty-six
Once each, no hints.
The marked twenty-five
Dakuten and handakuten together. Once each.
The thirty-three combinations
Once each.
Marked and unmarked, mixed
The three rounds above told you which kind you were looking at. This one does not — seventy-one characters in one bag, so noticing the mark is part of the work.
Everything
All 104, unsorted. Nothing in hiragana is outside this drill.
Five sentences
Ordinary Japanese, written in hiragana. The grammar has not been taught here — that is Bunpo's half — so the meaning is given. What is being asked of you is the reading.
Spaces are optional; type it as romaji or as you would on a keyboard.
Done
Every hiragana there is, and five sentences read without help. Sixteen lessons ago the first screen said the goal was Japanese rather than hiragana, and this is the point where that stops being a promise.
What you can actually do now
Sound out any hiragana word, correctly. Read a menu written in kana. Type Japanese, since typing is romaji in and kana out. Use a dictionary, which is the real unlock — you can now look up a word you have heard.
What you cannot do yet is read most real text, because it mixes katakana for loanwords and kanji for everything else. That is the next two stages, and the first of them is small: katakana is the same hundred and four sounds in a second set of shapes, learned in about a third of the time because you already know what every one of them says.
Where to go
The chart stays here as reference — every cell plays, and the mnemonics are all in one place if a shape stops coming to you.
Take grammar and vocabulary to Bunpo, which is what it is good at, and bring anything that does not make sense back here. The mission and the stages after this one are in MISSION.md.