Back to hiragana for another lesson, bear with me, pupils.
If you read through the chart I provided, you probably noticed that adding a little " mark to the character changes its sound, and that adding a little circle to the "H" characters turns them into "P" characters.
If you did not notice that, please review this chart.
http://www.tokyowithkids.com/fyi/hiragana_chart.htmlYou will need to memorize which characters change sounds.
K becomes G
S becomes Z
T becomes D
H becomes B
H with circle becomes P
At the very bottom of the chart, you also probably noticed the "kya, kyu,", etc symbols. Whenever you see a syllable like "sha", you write it as shi + small ya.
Note that you can only do this with characters that end in the "i" sound, like ki, mi, bi, chi, etc.
You'll also notice that some Japanese words, when written out in roman letters (romaji), have a double consonant. For example, the word "notte" (which is a version of the verb, "to ride") has a double t.
That shows up in hiragana like this:
のって
See the small tsu? That small tsu character indicates that when you say the word, you sort of stop your throat at that point. It creates a very hard T sound, which is expressed as "notte" in romaji.
You've also probably seen romaji words with a line written over the o. THIS DOES NOT INDICATE A DOUBLE O. A long O sound is always produced by an O syllable followed by a U.
Ex - Tōkyō is written in Japanese as "toukyou", not tookyoo.
I hope that this answers any questions you might have had about hiragana. If you have more questions, post them here. Hiragana is hard work, with lots of memorization, so keep playing those games from lesson one!
がんばって！
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