The Tale of the Little Tsu
Friday, November 27th, 2009
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.
Thank you so much! This is really helpful! Have been learning japanese for about 10 weeks now, and was starting to get questions like this xD <3
Great to hear – the small tsu is tricky to start with but once you get it, it all makes heaps of sense ^_^
hey there, my name is written with a tsu in katakana like this: ベッル, but do i spell that? it sounds more similar to original one when i spell tsu. if i do spell that, how am i gonna understand when? thanks ^_^
Your name written as ベッル reads as Berru (Be-r-ru) with the small tsu doubling the next consonant.
However, if the tsu is just the normal tsu then it will read as Betsuru (ベツル – Be-tsu-ru)
Does that makes sense?
ah, so its kind of a caps lock difference
got it now, thanks a lot ^_^
Yeh sort of ^_^
My name is Ellen and I always tought that my Japanese name was エレン (Eren)。 But wouldn’t it be エッレン (Erren) then?
x
エレン is definitely correct for your name as far as I know ^_^