When you’re just starting to learn Japanese, the hiragana small tsu (っ) is one of those tricky little buggers that may cause some confusion.

I probably raced a head a little when I ordered a set of Japanese Graded Readers (Level 1) from White Rabbit Press in the first few months of learning Japanese. While I didn’t know many Japanese words at that stage, I wanted to improve my hiragana reading abilities and expand my vocabulary.

I began making my way through the text of the book using an online dictionary to translate as I went. I had no idea about particles (a topic for another article) and I had never heard of such a thing as a small tsu (っ).

So every time I saw something like がっこう (gakkou), I thought it was reading as が (ga) っ (tsu) こ (ko) う (u) and consequently I searched for “gatsukou” in my dictionary and came up with nothing, which got very frustrating. Then one day I read about the small tsu and bing (picture of lightbulb here) – it all made sense.

How Does It Work?

The small tsu (っ) is used to indicate a double consonant as the Japanese written language does not offer a way to write “gakkou” as the only available sounds are が (ga), こ (ko) and う (u) so there is no sound for a standalone “k” at all.

If we want the letter “k” in a word we only get to choose from ka (か), ki (き), ku (く), ke (け), ko (こ) and that’s it – or so we thought! Now that we know about the small tsu (っ) we simply add one in before the “k” hiragana of our choice (こ in this case) and we get a double “k” – がっこう (ga-k-ko-u) – simple huh? (^_^)

I have included below a few examples for clarification – any questions please leave a comment below.

Kana	English	Romaji
がっこう	ga-k-ko-u	School
きっぷ	ki-p-pu	Ticket
まっすぐ	ma-s-su-gu	Straight
あさって	a-sa-t-te	Day after tomorrow
ハット	ha-t-to	Hat, Cap
アイスホッケー	a-i-su-ho-k-ke	Ice Hockey
サッカー	sa-k-ka	Soccer

Just to be mean (or helpful depending on how you look at it), I have thrown in a “ー” to the mix on the final two katakana example words. This symbol is known as a chōonpu and extends the sound before it so カ sounds like “kaa” rather than “ka”. I’ll make sure I cover that in a future article.

Back to the topic.

When you get through the hiragana, the next step is katakana where you’ll find another small tsu, which looks like ッ and does the same thing as the hiragana version.

An example of the katakana small tsu in action can be seen in the Japanese word for Ice Hockey (アイスホッケー). You see the small tsu takes on the “k” from “ke”. If the next katakana was “se” then the small tsu would be “s” as it always takes on the first consonant following itself.

Some argue that the small tsu is simply a marker to take a very short pause during the word. Not sure I agree but either way you’ll get the same result out of your mouth.

By the way, there are several more small hiragana – や (ya), ゆ (yu), よ (yo) plus a bunch of other hiragana and katakana quirks like this – but we will get those in a later article as there is enough to absorb here for now.

Add Your Comment | zonjineko! Free Monthly Newsletter