Meet the W family and the N consonant in hiragana and learn how to correctly write your strokes!
The W family and the N consonant in hiragana
The hiragana WA ( わ ) is very easy to confuse with the hiragana NE ( ね ) and with RE ( れ ). Notice that they have the same writing, but NE has a small loop at the bottom. To differentiate one symbol from another, I had to think of a different path when associating the WA character in the way used in NE.
Notice that the first dash would be (as always) a ninja and the second dash is composed of two symbols: a 7 and a nose. So we can put together a little story…
The ninja angry with my friend WAlter, hit him seven times with the numeral "7" right on the nose until WAlter's nose bleeds. To remember the sound of this symbol, when I say WA of WAlter I say UAlter. Distorting syllables to resemble Japanese speech.
Below is the order of the strokes:
WO = を
If you look carefully, the second-to-last symbol of hiragana appears to be made up of three letters from our alphabet: T, L (crooked down), and C.
To remember the lyrics that make up this hiragana I associated it with the story of a giant armadillo licking its own shell. Along with that, just remember that the turtle's name is Uóli (Wally).
N = ん
This is the easiest hiragana to learn, it is identical to our italic “h” (lying down) and with more wavy strokes. So just imagine a person with diction problems. Just as some people swap the R for the L, this person swaps the H for the N.
The cool thing about the letter ん is that it has the same use as N in Portuguese, being able to join with vowels or other syllables to form nasal sounds like: na, ana, no, yesterday, ni, winter…
Japanese calligraphy exercise
Select the Japanese alphabet symbols and click the Generate button in the Worksheet for Kana and Kanji Practice . Then a new window will open with the file for printing. Then just print it out, cover the gray hiragana symbols and then try to write it yourself. Just print and practice!
| わ | を | ん |