Hiragana Chart

A Japanese hiragana chart is always drawn as a grid, and there is a reason for that. Every hiragana except ん is a consonant plus one of five vowels, a, i, u, e and o. That is the whole system, and it is why the chart is a grid rather than a list: read a row across and you have a complete consonant family, read a column down and you have one vowel across every consonant.

The blank cells are not missing data. Yi, ye, wi, wu and we existed in older Japanese and fell out of the language, so nothing goes there. ん is the only kana that is a consonant on its own, and it never starts a word.

People often call this the hiragana alphabet, but hiragana is a syllabary: each character is a whole syllable rather than a single letter, which is why a hiragana alphabet chart is really a table of sounds. It is one half of the Japanese kana chart, and the katakana chart is the other.

Learn the hiragana table by row, not alphabetically. Five kana at a time is a sitting, and by the time you finish the M row you already read most of a beginner sentence.

Two short strokes, called dakuten, voice the consonant: か ka becomes が ga, さ sa becomes ざ za, た ta becomes だ da and は ha becomes ば ba. A small circle, called handakuten, only ever appears on the は row and turns h into p, so は ha becomes ぱ pa.

This is the cheapest 25 characters you will ever learn. You are not memorising new shapes, you are reusing five rows you already know.

Two readings repeat. じ and ぢ both read ji, and ず and づ both read zu. In modern Japanese you will write じ and ず almost every time; ぢ and づ survive mostly inside compound words such as つづく (tsuzuku, to continue).

Take a kana from the i column and add a small ゃ, ゅ or ょ. き ki plus a small ゃ gives きゃ kya, which is a single syllable. Written full size, きや is ki-ya, two beats and a different word.

Size is the only thing on the page that tells them apart, which is why handwriting the small kana properly matters more than beginners expect. しゃ sha, しゅ shu and しょ sho are the set you will meet first, in words such as しゃしん (shashin, photo).

A small っ has no sound of its own. It doubles the consonant that follows and adds a beat of silence: きて kite means come, きって kitte means stamp. Skipping that pause is one of the fastest ways to be misheard.

Hiragana writes a long vowel by adding a vowel kana rather than a bar. おかあさん is okaasan, おにいさん is oniisan. The long o is usually spelled with う, which is why 学校 is がっこう gakkou and 東京 is とうきょう toukyou. The ー bar belongs to katakana, not here.

The printable hiragana chart PDF is one page: gojuon through dakuten, handakuten and every combination. It is a hiragana romaji chart, so each kana carries its reading underneath.

Download printable PDF

If you would rather drill than print, the fastest hiragana practice is the hiragana and katakana quiz, set to hiragana only. Reading kana in a real sentence is the step after that, and the sentence analyzer breaks any Japanese sentence down word by word.