Download this beautiful free Hiragana font here, one of our many Japanese freebies. Especially recommended for those who want to learn Japanese on line for free.
This Japanese font uses the Japanese Hiragana alphabet. For those who are new in learning Japanese writing: the modern Japanese have 3 ways to write down Japanese words:
- Hiragana and
Hiragana and Katakana are both syllabic-phonetic alphabets, where Kanji uses one character to depict one entire Japanese word.
Kana is the word used to represent the 3 syllabic Japanese scripts:
- Katakana, and
- the old syllabic use of kanji known as Man’yo-Gana.
1. Learn Kanji
Kanji is a set of Japanese characters or ideographs which the Japanese derived from the older Chinese characters.
Kanji translation can be overwhelming but you should learn kanji with the simple characters first like so:
- “one” ,
- “two” ,
- “three” ,
- “mouth” ,
- “tree” ,
- “forest” ,
- “woods” ,
- “mountain” ,
- “rain” ,
- “rice field” ,
- “umbrella” .
Kanji charts are used to keep track of your progress when you learn Kanji. Notice that there are only 80 Kanji characters on this Japanese first grader’s Kanji chart.
2. Hiragana Symbols
Hiragana symbols form a phonetic alphabet used:
- when there are no Kanji – or Japanese characters – for the words or
- when you don’t remember the right Kanji character.
Hiragana symbols are the main syllabary for the Japanese language, used to represent native Japanese words.
Katakana is also a phonetic alphabet used mainly to be able to write foreign names. This Japanese writing is used when:
- writing words borrowed from foreign languages other than Chinese
- writing specific names of plants and animals and other jargon or
- emphasizing a word or phrase.
Download a free hiragana font