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Hiragana is one of the Japanese alphabets.You may believe that it is hard to learn Japanese and in particular reading.I can remember when I first started learning Japanese and looking at the unfamiliar Japanese alpahbets.I wondered if I’d ever manage to make any sense from the characters.I did it, and you can too!The best way to approach the task is to break it down and progress with small steps.

So, there are in fact 3 scripts or alphabets used in Japanese and Hiragana is one of them. In addition to Hiragana, there is also Kanji and Katakana.They are each used for different purposes.Kanji is used for chinese characters and each character has a meaning of their own.There are thousands of Kanji characters so it is not the best place to start.As Hiragana and Katakana have a small number of characters compared to Kanji, it is better to start with learning one of them.

So, the best place to start with reading Japanese is with Hiragana or Katakana.Hiragana and Katakana are made from syllables so each character doesn’t have a meaning just on its own, they’re more like letters in our alphablet.The characters in hiragana or katakana can be combined to represent any word in the Japanese language.Katakana is used for words that have been taken from other languages such as English, Spanish or Dutch to name a few and have been adapted for use in Japanese.So, kanji is used for words in a sentence, katakana is used for foreign ‘loan’ words and hiragana is used for words that cannot be written in kanji and for other parts of a sentence.

It is good to start learning Hiragana as a lot of people can learn all of the characters in just a couple of hours.There are only 46 basic characters in Hiragana.The characters in Hiragana are made by combining one of the consonants k,s,t,n,h,m,y,r, with a vowel to make characters such as ka, sa, ta, mi, mu and son on.There are also a couple of extra characters that do not follow this pattern, which are wa, wo and n. After you have studied the characters of Hiragana, you will be able to read or write any words in the the Japanese language if they are written in Hiragana. With a little effort, you will be able to read Hiragana in a very short time.One of the best ways to learn Hiragana is with a Hiragana Chart.