Japanese Pronunciation Using Hiragana

Teaching reading IS rocket science - Louisa Moats

Before you start reading, and before you start writing, you’re going to learn how to pronounce nearly all the “sounds” of the Japanese language. If you can’t pronounce anything, you won’t be able to read or write anything either. If you learn how to pronounce something while you’re learning to read and write it, you’ll run into overload. By learning pronunciation first (without knowing how to read or write anything) you’re essentially breaking the process up into smaller pieces and ultimately saving yourself a lot of time.

In order to learn the pronunciation, though, we’re going to use hiragana. For the most part, by learning the pronunciation of all the hiragana “letters” you’ll be able to learn most of the sounds in the Japanese language. It’s like hitting two birds with one stone. First, you get to learn hiragana, and second you get to learn pronunciation of the Japanese language.

So, let’s get going, eh?

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