Hiragana: The N Line
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010
Welcome to the fifth instalment of our hiragana lessons on zonjineko.com – the hiragana N line.
We’ll be going through the N line of the hiragana table, which returns us briefly to the standard aiueo order of the earlier hiragana rows.
The N line consists of na (な), ni (に), nu (ぬ), ne (ね) and no (の). There are a few important hiragana in this line that you’ll frequently see in any Japanese sentences.
N Line Particles
Aside from its general use as part of word like こんにちは (ko-n-ni-chi-wa), ni (に) is also used as a particle. The use of ni (に) in a sentence can indicate place, destination, date and time or who/what an action is directed to.
The other hiragana particle in the N line is no (の) and if you ever visit Japan or read any Japanese, you will see this particle used a lot and (perhaps) primarily to show possession.
- Hiragana: これ は わたし の かさ です。(kore-wa-watashi-no-kasa-desu)
- Kanji: これは私の傘です。
- English: This is my umbrella.
To save confusion at this point, I’ll leave any further particle discussions for another article. Google “japanese particles” to find out more if you’d like to jump ahead.
ne (ね) is a hiragana you may tend to hear more than you actually read on a daily basis. If you listen to any casual Japanese conversation for a short period of time you will hear ne (ね) at the end of a lot of sentences.
A popular example would be: そう です ね (so-desu-ne), which sounds like “so dess nay”. This phrase has many meanings but it’s generally “yeh, that’s right” or “yeh, you’re right”.
N Line Examples
| Hiragana | Romaji | Example | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| な | na | はな (ha-na) | flower, nose |
| に | ni | こんにちは (ko-n-ni-chi-wa) | hello |
| ぬ | nu | いぬ (i-nu) | dog |
| ね | ne | おかね (o-ka-ne) | money |
| の | no | きのう (ki-no-u) | yesterday |
As you move past the kana (hiragana and katakana) and on to kanji, your use of Hiragana will be less and less, however there are certain words that do not have a kanji equivalent and always appear as hiragana.
Hiragana is also used to add on to the end of kanji for other reasons, which we’ll get to much later. Suffice to say you need to know hiragana ^_^
Hiragana In The Wild
To see real world usage of hiragana, try visiting a site such as Yomiuri Online, a popular Japanese news site, and read through as many stories as possible, pick out the hiragana you know and make a note of your progress. It’s exciting as a beginner to realise that you are improving your Japanese skills and can identify some actual real-life Japanese.
Please don’t ever be discouraged by how much you don’t know in terms of kana or kanji – just get excited about the ones you do know.
Learn Not Burn
As I mentioned in previous articles, I see a lot of students that think they can learn the hiragana in a day. While this may be true, the retention of this quick learning may be fairly short. We have all crammed for exams before and a week later remember none of it.
There’s no doubt some people can learn things very quickly but I prefer to take it slowly and make sure I am actually learning what I am reading rather than just cramming and forgetting.
I find the best practice is to read as much hiragana text as you can even if you don’t understand what the words mean. You want to get to the point where you can read it as quickly as your own alphabet and while this seems a mile away at the moment – it will become reality as long as you put in the hours to make it happen.
Practice
I have included below a na-ni-nu-ne-no (な-に-ぬ-ね-の) worksheet for you to practice writing and memorising the characters plus a full hiragana worksheet.
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