Lesson 5 of 12
Kana Sprint 5 — や, ら, わ and ん
about 5 minutes
After this lesson you can
- Read the や, ら and わ rows and ん on sight.
- Read any of the 46 base hiragana without a chart.
Words this lesson teaches
- わたし
- I, me — wa-ta-shi
- やすみ
- a day off, a break — ya-su-mi
- れん
- Ren, the name from Foundations — re-n
- はる
- Haru, the name from Foundations — ha-ru
- やま
- mountain — ya-ma
What it explains
を is a particle and nothing else
を is pronounced exactly like お. You will never see it inside a word — it exists only to mark what a verb acts on, which is the second of the three particles that keep an old spelling. Because it has one job, seeing it tells you something about the sentence before you have read the rest of it: whatever came before it is the thing being done to.
ん counts as a full beat
Everything else in the chart is a consonant plus a vowel, or a bare vowel. ん is alone in being just a consonant, and it still takes a whole beat of its time. みなさん is four beats, mi-na-sa-n, not three. Getting this wrong is what makes a beginner's Japanese sound rushed at the end of words, and it is easier to fix now than later.
That is all 46
You have now met every base hiragana. Everything from here is built out of what you already have: two dots and a circle in Sprint 6, shrunken characters in Sprint 7, and then the second alphabet. Nothing new in shape, only in combination. This is the point §4.5 of the design is aiming at — you did not have to finish the chart before starting to read, and you did not.