Hiragana 1: the a, ka, sa, ta and na rows

Modern hiragana has 46 basic letters, and the first five rows of the chart already give you 25 of them.

Pick up a Japanese newspaper and you will see three kinds of writing in a single sentence. Kanji, the characters borrowed from Chinese, carry most of the meaning. Hiragana, the rounded letters, write grammar endings, small words and anything without a common kanji. Katakana, the angular letters, write words taken from other languages. Picture books for young children are printed almost entirely in hiragana, and adult books print small hiragana beside hard kanji to show how they are read. That is why every course starts with hiragana: with it you can write any Japanese word, even before you know a single kanji.

One letter, one beat

A kana is not a single consonant or vowel like the letters of English. Most kana stand for a whole beat of sound, such as ka, mi or to. Linguists call this beat a mora, and Japanese speakers count it when they clap out a word or fit words into a haiku. The word さくら (sakura, cherry blossom) is three kana and three even beats: sa, ku, ra. Keeping the beats even matters more than getting each sound perfect, because Japanese has no strong stressed syllable the way English does.

The fifty-sounds chart

Kana are learned from a grid called the gojūon, the fifty-sounds chart. Each row shares a consonant and each column shares a vowel, always in the order a, i, u, e, o. The rows follow a fixed order too: a, ka, sa, ta, na, ha, ma, ya, ra, wa. Dictionaries, phone contacts and class lists in Japan are sorted this way, the way English uses ABC. The name says fifty, but a few slots are empty or no longer used, so the modern chart has 46 basic hiragana. This unit covers the first five rows.

Five vowels

The first row is the five vowels: あ a, い i, う u, え e, お o. Say them short and clean. あ is the a of father, cut short. い is the ee of see, without the glide at the end. え is close to the e of bet. お is the o of more, with no r and no slide into oo. う is the one to watch: Tokyo speakers say it with relaxed, nearly flat lips, so it sounds softer than the English oo in food. Every other kana in the chart ends in one of these five vowels, so time spent here pays off in every later row.

The k, s, t and n rows

Add k to the vowels and you have か ka, き ki, く ku, け ke, こ ko. The s row has one surprise: し is said shi, as in she. The t row has two: ち is chi, as in cheese, and つ is tsu, the ts at the end of cats followed by a soft u. English speakers often say つ as su or tsoo with rounded lips, and the fix is to start with the tip of the tongue touching the ridge behind the top teeth. The n row is regular: な na, に ni, ぬ nu, ね ne, の no.

Two more habits help with these rows. The k and t sounds at the start of a word are lightly puffed, softer than English k and t. Inside a word, many listeners hear them as unpuffed, close to the k in skin and the t in stop. And the vowels i and u often go quiet between voiceless consonants: Tokyo speakers say です (desu) closer to dess, and すき (suki, to like) closer to ski. You do not need to copy that yet, but it explains why recordings sometimes seem to skip a vowel.

Spelling Japanese in Latin letters

This course writes Japanese in Latin letters (rōmaji) with the Hepburn style: shi, chi, tsu. In December 2025 the Japanese government replaced its 1954 rules, which had put si, ti and tu first, with a new Cabinet Notice built on the Hepburn spellings. Road signs and passports already used them, so the change mostly made official what people saw every day. Rōmaji is useful for looking things up and for typing kana on a keyboard, but read from the kana as soon as you can, because rōmaji hides the beat structure.