9 ms·

Interactive Hiragana chart with audio

88 points by sova 3y ago

iqihs 3y ago
As an N4 student of Japanese the origin story of Hiragana listed here was quite interesting. However the overall layout/design of the characters and page leaves much to be desired.
- mito88 3y ago
  なるほど
- labster 3y ago
  仮名より団子
2143 3y ago
I know absolutely no Japanese letters. And FWIW, I also know absolutely no Chinese/Mandarin (btw are they the same?), Korean etc. I speak two languages — English and another language you probably haven't heard of that does not use English-looking letters (such as "a", "b" etc). Anyway, provided I'm told that a given text is Japanese, I can tell if a letter is Kanji, Katakana, or Hiragana. Which I think is commendable — if I may say so myself — given I didn't even know about the existence of "Kanji", "Katakana", or "Hiragana" until 3 years ago.
- TwelveNights 3y ago
  Mandarin is a spoken form of Chinese. So Mandarin and Cantonese, for example, share the same character set (Chinese). There's also traditional vs simplified Chinese, technically; they're similar with some differences in how they're written. Japanese also has some differences which can be confusing because a lot of application developers just use the Chinese character sets for kanji: https://heistak.github.io/your-code-displays-japanese-wrong/ https://heistak.github.io/your-code-displays-japanese-wrong/ One other thing about Chinese is that TV shows and movies usually have hard-coded subtitles while airing because the spoken versions of the language can be very different from one another. Including the text makes it more accessible to a wider audience regardless of what "dialect" is spoken in the show.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    > So Mandarin and Cantonese, for example, share the same character set (Chinese). This isn't really true; there are characters that are exclusive to one or the other, like 冇. The stronger political position of Mandarin means that its idiosyncratic characters are viewed as "real" while the idiosyncratic characters required by other languages aren't, but it's a fundamentally symmetric situation. > One other thing about Chinese is that TV shows and movies usually have hard-coded subtitles while airing because the spoken versions of the language can be very different from one another. The written versions of the language are also that different. The subtitles are in Mandarin, which everyone must learn to read. (How common are hard-coded subtitles in modern Chinese media? They're on the older stuff, but it seems like a lot of modern shows don't bother.)
    - msla 3y ago
      It's hard to acknowledge the massive cultural imperialism the PRC has engaged in with regards to Mandarin without getting "corrected" by people with an agenda. It's amazing how "fun facts" like "Everyone in China speaks a dialect of Chinese!" (they're vastly different languages, like how German and Italian aren't dialects of European) and "Everyone in China, no matter what dialect they speak, can pass notes!" (because everyone is forced to learn to read Mandarin no matter what language they actually speak) implicitly support that imperialism.
      - thaumasiotes 3y ago
        > they're vastly different languages, like how German and Italian aren't dialects of European They're different, but not that different. If we believe Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Chinese ): > [Varieties of Min] form the only branch of Chinese that cannot be directly derived from Middle Chinese. So the divergence between Mandarin and Cantonese [neither belonging to the Min branch] could be dated back maybe 1500 years. The divergence between German and Italian is much, much older than that. English and Swedish would make a more apt comparison than German and Italian.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > I also know absolutely no Chinese/Mandarin (btw are they the same?) If you see a bare reference to "Chinese", it will be referring to Mandarin. There are several families of Chinese languages, with the most prominent being: - 官话 (literally "mandarin speech"; Mandarin belongs to this family) - 粤语 ("Yue language"; Cantonese belongs to this one) - 吴语 ("Wu language"; Shanghainese belongs here) - 闽南语 ("Southern Min language"; Hokkien belongs here) It's also possible (and routine) to just label a variety of speech with the name of the place where it is spoken. This gives the names of specific dialects rather than broad families: - 普通话 ("ordinary speech", this is Mandarin. It is conceived of as being an artificial standard rather than being specifically associated with any particular place.) - 广东话 ("Cantonese", the speech of 广东, which is a large province) - 上海话 ("Shanghainese", the speech of 上海, which while admittedly a large city is not as large as a province) - 福建话 ("Hokkien", the speech of 福建, also a large province) - 北京话 ("Beijingnese", again just a city. This construction applies at pretty much every scope.) 普通话 is the official name of Mandarin, but there are some important synonyms: - 汉语 ("Han language" - Han is the ethnic term for the Chinese people. As noted, synonymous with Mandarin.) - 中文 ("Chinese" - here the term is taken from the name of China, 中国. Also synonymous with Mandarin.)
- yorwba 3y ago
  There are some lookalikes, though. 夕べ is easily confused for katakana タベ (tabe), but is actually kanji 夕 (yuu) + hiragana べ (be). Hence it is more commonly written 昨夜 using kanji only.
  - soraminazuki 3y ago
    In practice though, you'll never confuse them because katakanas are only used for non-Japanese words. 昨夜 sounds a bit too formal if you're chatting with friends.
    - Macha 3y ago
      I mean, it depends. Fiction at least will sometimes use katakana for emphasis or to point out a word that sounds different, a bit like using all caps in english, except a little bit more common. I've certainly seen タベナ as an instruction to eat in a manga recently.
- bradrn 3y ago
  > another language you probably haven't heard of that does not use English-looking letters Out of curiosity, which language is it? And which writing system are you talking about?
- Macha 3y ago
  > Anyway, provided I'm told that a given text is Japanese, I can tell if a letter is Kanji, Katakana, or Hiragana. Sometimes harder than you might think. e.g. consider: ＊ロ口＊タ夕＊かカ力＊りリ (edit: these are more similar in the monotype font in the HN input box than the rendered comment)
bcherny 3y ago
Why is this trending on HN? It's one of a thousand resources on Japanese, and a poorly built and incomplete one at that. Is this blogspam?
- reedf1 3y ago
  Agreed - but probably the tight coupling between the hiragana, the romanji and the audio may give people a bit of a casual revelation about Japanese symbols. (They are not all anki, wanikani, flavor of the month SRS spammers like some of us)
- blackkettle 3y ago
  The “history” is not very accurate either.
- boredhedgehog 3y ago
  I can only tell you why I upvoted it: It looks like a useful learning tool, as different sense experiences are associated with each other. I don't find it poorly built, and I don't know enough Japanese to know what's incomplete.
  - geraldwhen 3y ago
    I can name 3 apps that do this website better and actually teach you to write kanji. - Skritter - Kana (free) - Japanese! The parent comment is reasonable. Learning hiragana also takes no more than a week or two if you’re actively practicing writing.
    - otherme123 3y ago
      Even F-droid has half a dozen apps to learn the writting system. The problem with learning this, is that when you know katakana and hiragana perfectly, you are still in the same learning spot that you are today to learn finnish or euskera, and much worse than german or danish (they have things in common with english).
- acqbu 3y ago
famahar 3y ago
So many of these sites exist. I even made one as a hobby project for learning React. Mine is a bit more involved (learn mode with mnemonics, quiz mode with a timer and different fonts, character filtering and modified characters). Thinking about expanding on it if anyone would like to suggest ideas or fork it. I mostly made it to force me to learn Katakana and Hiragana. https://github.com/fama-623/Kana-Cards https://github.com/fama-623/Kana-Cards
drorco 3y ago
> Hiragana being far more useful to know starting out, if you had to pick one. Before visiting Japan, I learned to read in both Hiragana and Katakana, but I didn't really know more than a dozen or so words in Japanese. While visiting Japan, I found Katakana to be a lot more useful, because it's commonly used and often is just English words converted to Japanese letters. I think all my Hiragana reading abilities were completely useless as I couldn't tell what I was reading.
- samus 3y ago
  > I think all my Hiragana reading abilities were completely useless as I couldn't tell what I was reading. This is what many people don't realize when they wish they wouldn't have to learn Kanji or Hanzi. They make a lot of sense for languages with lots of homophones. Edit: typo because of autocomplete
  - yakubin 3y ago
    > They make a lot of sense for languages with lots of homophobes. I think you meant homophones. At least I hope so.
    - samus 3y ago
      Lol, thanks for spotting :)
  - lloda 3y ago
    Homophones can be disambiguated in writing the same way they are disambiguated in speech, or they can just fall into disuse and be replaced.
    - samus 3y ago
      This sounds easy in theory, but so far only one language has succeeded in completely getting rid of the Chinese characters: Vietnamese. This transition was imposed by the French colonial administration however, to more easily spread European-style civilization by breaking their connection to their native culture. A Vietnamese-speaker would have to tell whether there are any issues with homophones nowadays. In Korea, Hanja are still actively used for disambiguation of homophones in complex texts. Public debate was divided for a long time, and even though Hanja are slowly being phased out, it is a slow process. It's hard to tell for sure, but even in North Korea the process seems incomplete.
Twisol 3y ago
I learned hiragana and katakana by drilling RealKana [0], together with the Flash-based Drag-n-Drops [1] back when Flash was still a thing. It looks like the original author of [1] has non-Flash versions now [2]. RealKana is great for drilling recognition (kana -> pronunciation), and I learned the individual kana by loading one column at a time (e.g. ka/ki/ku/ke/ko). Drag-n-Drop is good for speed-testing recognition, but also for recall (pronunciation -> kana), since it's invertible: you can either choose a pronunciation and go find its kana, or choose a kana and find which pronunciation it goes to. I'm not sure you can really "learn" these characters without drilling like this -- the symbols are arbitrary, so you have to memorize the association between glyph and reading by brute force. [0] https://realkana.com/ https://realkana.com/ [1] https://www.csus.edu/indiv/s/sheaa/projects/genki/hira_main.html https://www.csus.edu/indiv/s/sheaa/projects/genki/hira_main.... [2] https://ohelo.github.io/usagi-chan/katakana/ https://ohelo.github.io/usagi-chan/katakana/
- userbinator 3y ago
  There are some patterns in hiragana that can make them a little easier to memorise; e.g. はばぱほぼぽふぶぷへべぺ
  - Twisol 3y ago
    Yes -- the dakuten and handakuten marks are very systematic modifiers of the readings of the underlying glyphs. The dakuten more or less voices the leading syllable (ka -> ga, ta -> da), and the handakuten only applies to H*-column kana and changes the sound to a P*. From my perspective, you only really need to learn the base kana and remember the rule for the modifying marks -- you're not learning entire new kana after that. (There's also combinations like kyu = ki + small-yu, but that also just builds on the kana you already know, and behaves pretty logically.)
    - thaumasiotes 3y ago
      > and the handakuten only applies to H*-column kana and changes the sound to a P*. Modification to /p/ might make more sense if you call it the F*-column rather than the H*-column.
layer8 3y ago
I can’t stop hitting the にゃ.
butz 3y ago
Layout breaks for "ko" (and some other sounds) on desktop browser. I was thinking of building similar tool, but using hover and probably doing some smart-ish preloading thing, or adding all sounds to one huge audio file and seeking them, to make it easier to be cached and work offline. A quick switch to Katakana shouldn't be hard to implement too.

88 points by sova 3y ago

As an N4 student of Japanese the origin story of Hiragana listed here was quite interesting. However the overall layout/design of the characters and page leaves much to be desired.

mito88 3y ago
なるほど
labster 3y ago
仮名より団子

2143 3y ago

I know absolutely no Japanese letters. And FWIW, I also know absolutely no Chinese/Mandarin (btw are they the same?), Korean etc. I speak two languages — English and another language you probably haven't heard of that does not use English-looking letters (such as "a", "b" etc). Anyway, provided I'm told that a given text is Japanese, I can tell if a letter is Kanji, Katakana, or Hiragana. Which I think is commendable — if I may say so myself — given I didn't even know about the existence of "Kanji", "Katakana", or "Hiragana" until 3 years ago.

TwelveNights 3y ago
Mandarin is a spoken form of Chinese. So Mandarin and Cantonese, for example, share the same character set (Chinese). There's also traditional vs simplified Chinese, technically; they're similar with some differences in how they're written. Japanese also has some differences which can be confusing because a lot of application developers just use the Chinese character sets for kanji: https://heistak.github.io/your-code-displays-japanese-wrong/ https://heistak.github.io/your-code-displays-japanese-wrong/ One other thing about Chinese is that TV shows and movies usually have hard-coded subtitles while airing because the spoken versions of the language can be very different from one another. Including the text makes it more accessible to a wider audience regardless of what "dialect" is spoken in the show.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > So Mandarin and Cantonese, for example, share the same character set (Chinese). This isn't really true; there are characters that are exclusive to one or the other, like 冇. The stronger political position of Mandarin means that its idiosyncratic characters are viewed as "real" while the idiosyncratic characters required by other languages aren't, but it's a fundamentally symmetric situation. > One other thing about Chinese is that TV shows and movies usually have hard-coded subtitles while airing because the spoken versions of the language can be very different from one another. The written versions of the language are also that different. The subtitles are in Mandarin, which everyone must learn to read. (How common are hard-coded subtitles in modern Chinese media? They're on the older stuff, but it seems like a lot of modern shows don't bother.)
  - msla 3y ago
    It's hard to acknowledge the massive cultural imperialism the PRC has engaged in with regards to Mandarin without getting "corrected" by people with an agenda. It's amazing how "fun facts" like "Everyone in China speaks a dialect of Chinese!" (they're vastly different languages, like how German and Italian aren't dialects of European) and "Everyone in China, no matter what dialect they speak, can pass notes!" (because everyone is forced to learn to read Mandarin no matter what language they actually speak) implicitly support that imperialism.
    - thaumasiotes 3y ago
      > they're vastly different languages, like how German and Italian aren't dialects of European They're different, but not that different. If we believe Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Chinese ): > [Varieties of Min] form the only branch of Chinese that cannot be directly derived from Middle Chinese. So the divergence between Mandarin and Cantonese [neither belonging to the Min branch] could be dated back maybe 1500 years. The divergence between German and Italian is much, much older than that. English and Swedish would make a more apt comparison than German and Italian.
thaumasiotes 3y ago
> I also know absolutely no Chinese/Mandarin (btw are they the same?) If you see a bare reference to "Chinese", it will be referring to Mandarin. There are several families of Chinese languages, with the most prominent being: - 官话 (literally "mandarin speech"; Mandarin belongs to this family) - 粤语 ("Yue language"; Cantonese belongs to this one) - 吴语 ("Wu language"; Shanghainese belongs here) - 闽南语 ("Southern Min language"; Hokkien belongs here) It's also possible (and routine) to just label a variety of speech with the name of the place where it is spoken. This gives the names of specific dialects rather than broad families: - 普通话 ("ordinary speech", this is Mandarin. It is conceived of as being an artificial standard rather than being specifically associated with any particular place.) - 广东话 ("Cantonese", the speech of 广东, which is a large province) - 上海话 ("Shanghainese", the speech of 上海, which while admittedly a large city is not as large as a province) - 福建话 ("Hokkien", the speech of 福建, also a large province) - 北京话 ("Beijingnese", again just a city. This construction applies at pretty much every scope.) 普通话 is the official name of Mandarin, but there are some important synonyms: - 汉语 ("Han language" - Han is the ethnic term for the Chinese people. As noted, synonymous with Mandarin.) - 中文 ("Chinese" - here the term is taken from the name of China, 中国. Also synonymous with Mandarin.)
yorwba 3y ago
There are some lookalikes, though. 夕べ is easily confused for katakana タベ (tabe), but is actually kanji 夕 (yuu) + hiragana べ (be). Hence it is more commonly written 昨夜 using kanji only.
- soraminazuki 3y ago
  In practice though, you'll never confuse them because katakanas are only used for non-Japanese words. 昨夜 sounds a bit too formal if you're chatting with friends.
  - Macha 3y ago
    I mean, it depends. Fiction at least will sometimes use katakana for emphasis or to point out a word that sounds different, a bit like using all caps in english, except a little bit more common. I've certainly seen タベナ as an instruction to eat in a manga recently.
bradrn 3y ago
> another language you probably haven't heard of that does not use English-looking letters Out of curiosity, which language is it? And which writing system are you talking about?
Macha 3y ago
> Anyway, provided I'm told that a given text is Japanese, I can tell if a letter is Kanji, Katakana, or Hiragana. Sometimes harder than you might think. e.g. consider: ＊ロ口＊タ夕＊かカ力＊りリ (edit: these are more similar in the monotype font in the HN input box than the rendered comment)

bcherny 3y ago

Why is this trending on HN? It's one of a thousand resources on Japanese, and a poorly built and incomplete one at that. Is this blogspam?

reedf1 3y ago
Agreed - but probably the tight coupling between the hiragana, the romanji and the audio may give people a bit of a casual revelation about Japanese symbols. (They are not all anki, wanikani, flavor of the month SRS spammers like some of us)
blackkettle 3y ago
The “history” is not very accurate either.
boredhedgehog 3y ago
I can only tell you why I upvoted it: It looks like a useful learning tool, as different sense experiences are associated with each other. I don't find it poorly built, and I don't know enough Japanese to know what's incomplete.
- geraldwhen 3y ago
  I can name 3 apps that do this website better and actually teach you to write kanji. - Skritter - Kana (free) - Japanese! The parent comment is reasonable. Learning hiragana also takes no more than a week or two if you’re actively practicing writing.
  - otherme123 3y ago
    Even F-droid has half a dozen apps to learn the writting system. The problem with learning this, is that when you know katakana and hiragana perfectly, you are still in the same learning spot that you are today to learn finnish or euskera, and much worse than german or danish (they have things in common with english).
acqbu 3y ago

famahar 3y ago

So many of these sites exist. I even made one as a hobby project for learning React. Mine is a bit more involved (learn mode with mnemonics, quiz mode with a timer and different fonts, character filtering and modified characters). Thinking about expanding on it if anyone would like to suggest ideas or fork it. I mostly made it to force me to learn Katakana and Hiragana. https://github.com/fama-623/Kana-Cards https://github.com/fama-623/Kana-Cards

drorco 3y ago

> Hiragana being far more useful to know starting out, if you had to pick one. Before visiting Japan, I learned to read in both Hiragana and Katakana, but I didn't really know more than a dozen or so words in Japanese. While visiting Japan, I found Katakana to be a lot more useful, because it's commonly used and often is just English words converted to Japanese letters. I think all my Hiragana reading abilities were completely useless as I couldn't tell what I was reading.

samus 3y ago
> I think all my Hiragana reading abilities were completely useless as I couldn't tell what I was reading. This is what many people don't realize when they wish they wouldn't have to learn Kanji or Hanzi. They make a lot of sense for languages with lots of homophones. Edit: typo because of autocomplete
- yakubin 3y ago
  > They make a lot of sense for languages with lots of homophobes. I think you meant homophones. At least I hope so.
  - samus 3y ago
    Lol, thanks for spotting :)
- lloda 3y ago
  Homophones can be disambiguated in writing the same way they are disambiguated in speech, or they can just fall into disuse and be replaced.
  - samus 3y ago
    This sounds easy in theory, but so far only one language has succeeded in completely getting rid of the Chinese characters: Vietnamese. This transition was imposed by the French colonial administration however, to more easily spread European-style civilization by breaking their connection to their native culture. A Vietnamese-speaker would have to tell whether there are any issues with homophones nowadays. In Korea, Hanja are still actively used for disambiguation of homophones in complex texts. Public debate was divided for a long time, and even though Hanja are slowly being phased out, it is a slow process. It's hard to tell for sure, but even in North Korea the process seems incomplete.

Twisol 3y ago

I learned hiragana and katakana by drilling RealKana [0], together with the Flash-based Drag-n-Drops [1] back when Flash was still a thing. It looks like the original author of [1] has non-Flash versions now [2]. RealKana is great for drilling recognition (kana -> pronunciation), and I learned the individual kana by loading one column at a time (e.g. ka/ki/ku/ke/ko). Drag-n-Drop is good for speed-testing recognition, but also for recall (pronunciation -> kana), since it's invertible: you can either choose a pronunciation and go find its kana, or choose a kana and find which pronunciation it goes to. I'm not sure you can really "learn" these characters without drilling like this -- the symbols are arbitrary, so you have to memorize the association between glyph and reading by brute force. [0] https://realkana.com/ https://realkana.com/ [1] https://www.csus.edu/indiv/s/sheaa/projects/genki/hira_main.html https://www.csus.edu/indiv/s/sheaa/projects/genki/hira_main.... [2] https://ohelo.github.io/usagi-chan/katakana/ https://ohelo.github.io/usagi-chan/katakana/

userbinator 3y ago
There are some patterns in hiragana that can make them a little easier to memorise; e.g. はばぱほぼぽふぶぷへべぺ
- Twisol 3y ago
  Yes -- the dakuten and handakuten marks are very systematic modifiers of the readings of the underlying glyphs. The dakuten more or less voices the leading syllable (ka -> ga, ta -> da), and the handakuten only applies to H*-column kana and changes the sound to a P*. From my perspective, you only really need to learn the base kana and remember the rule for the modifying marks -- you're not learning entire new kana after that. (There's also combinations like kyu = ki + small-yu, but that also just builds on the kana you already know, and behaves pretty logically.)
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    > and the handakuten only applies to H*-column kana and changes the sound to a P*. Modification to /p/ might make more sense if you call it the F*-column rather than the H*-column.

layer8 3y ago

I can’t stop hitting the にゃ.

butz 3y ago

Layout breaks for "ko" (and some other sounds) on desktop browser. I was thinking of building similar tool, but using hover and probably doing some smart-ish preloading thing, or adding all sounds to one huge audio file and seeking them, to make it easier to be cached and work offline. A quick switch to Katakana shouldn't be hard to implement too.