こんにちにゃあ～！Welcome to Kiki+Koko: Let’s NihonGO!! Online! The Blog! In glorious technicolour! 嬉嬉ききと興子こうこでございます！We’re Kiki and Koko, your Japanese language and culture teachers, and also, apparently brand new social media users. Yes, we always try to keep these posts completely evergreen, but hopefully, this will still be a useful post long into the future.

Thank you for following us at @kikikokoNihonGO on Twitter! But, to stay up-to-date on the very latest posts, be sure to subscribe to the Electronic Mailing List of Tomorrow usually at the bottom of the webpage.

We’re now available on Twitter, otherwise known in Japanese as ツイッター, tsuittaa. We hope that it will open up many new opportunities for this blog, our videos, and the community. If you’d like to support us by just clicking a button, we would appreciate if you gave us a follow at @kikikokoNihonGO! It would brighten our days and give us an extra boost to give our best. We’ll try to have every article eventually available there so you can easily share them with your friends, peers, friends of friends, strangers, and just anyone who exists in this plane of reality. Or, if you can reach anyone in the fourth dimension who has the ability to follow on Twitter, that would be pretty neat.

Anyway, if you’re on Twitter, or want to use pretty much any facet of the internet, one very important aspect is reading! When your friends ask you about a post, you may want to be able to read it aloud, or even at all in your head. And to do that in Japanese… you… need to know how to—well….read.

Out of the previous lessons that included some different readings to what one might expect, these hiragana stick to a lot of what you would expect out of these pronunciations. And, if you’ve been here since あ, you’re literally nearly 70% of the way through  五十音順, gojuuon jun!! And, that’s pretty impressive to say the least. See, the more you learn, the more you’ll be able to learn. It’s all about challenging yourself to reach new milestones. And, whilst the huge milestone of becoming fluent is, of course, the goal anyone learning Japanese would have, it’s a very hazy mark that might be different for everyone and their needs. Giving yourself smaller goals of just learning the readings of a good bit of characters at a time allows for something attainable and manageable—something you can handle even on a busy schedule.

Even still, just a few minutes a day looking over what you’ve already learnt can be invaluable. Some people easily save these to their long term memory and others need a bit of a refresher. OH! Look! We seem to have dropped our previous reading and writing lessons a few sentences below! How clumsy of us! Well, I guess whilst they’re here, you can always take a few moments to revise… if you like. Otherwise, just take a step right over these.

Whew, thanks for bearing with us. You know how it is when you’re carrying a stack of hiragana lessons. Anyway! We think that should be more than enough to prepare you for the next five hiragana we’re going to teach you to read. But, if course, if you have no idea what hiragana is, then you can pop over to this article to see how the Japanese writing system works and pop back.

Hello, there! QUIZBO™でございます！Let’s read hiragana!  Let’s NihonGO!!

But, without further ado, we’ll need to enlist the help of our computer friend, QUIZBO™くん！(The ™ is silent) This is a portable version, QUIZBO™ Mini, who lives here on the site. He’ll be here to help sound out these hiragana for you. You can click the sound ‘bytes’ as many times as you’d like, QUIZBO™ won’t mind. ( Get it, bytes? … Computer?  …We’ll stick to teaching Japanese. ) Afterwards, you’ll be able to take a quiz with QUIZBO™ to help you review them or test your knowledge! Are you ready!?

Let’s NihonGO!! まみむめも!!

We’re going to show you the character, then you you can click the play button to hear QUIZBO™ sound it out for you. But, as a better visualisation of each sound, we also have the romanised pronunciation of each character so you have something in English to which you can compare it.

In romaji, 「ま」 is transliterated as「ma」which sounds like 「mahh」which sounds like the first or last syllable of the ma in 「mama」

In romaji, 「み」 is transliterated as 「mi」which sounds sort of like the mee in「meet」or simply close to the American or posh pronunciation of the word 「me」

In romaji, 「む」 is transliterated as 「mu」which sounds sort of like the mo in 「move」or the sound a cow makes in English, 「moo」

In romaji, 「め」 is transliterated as 「me」which sounds a bit like 「May」and looks a bit like a bowl of ramen with chop sticks sticking out of it. See it?

In romaji, 「も」 is transliterated as 「mo」which sounds sort of the the mo in「more」

And there you have it! The marvellous, miraculous, musically-mesmerising moji that are「まみむめも」!! This is definitely another set of hiragana that you’ll see quite often– the rest are, of course, very useful as well, but these definitely stick out in many words even when you begin learning kanji. But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves! Just focus on these characters and do your best reviewing them as often as you feel necessary to your learning. In the meantime, we’ll continue to teach you grammar, vocabulary, phrases, culture and more.

This is a huge step in your Japanese learning journey! When many people enter their first Japanese (as a second/third language) class, they feel left behind because courses seem to quickly slide through hiragana when children in Japan are given so much more time to learn and absorb it. So, by learning with us, you’re giving yourself the best chance at avoiding the frustration and fluster of a class gone-by too fast.

Everyone learns at a different pace and we want to make sure that you start your journey in a way that fits your needs. So feel free to ask questions! We’re here to jump in the drivers seat of the new car that is Japanese language and culture and steer you towards the best routes. Though, maybe that’s something meant more for AI… We’re more like the friendly helpers who sit in the passenger’s seat and point out the landmarks, telling you as much as we can as we drive by. Hopefully, you’ll make a stop at our next landmark lessons to further your understanding of Japanese language and culture.

We hope this was/will be helpful for you on your Japanese learning journey!
Until next time, thank you for visiting! And have a wonderful day!

♡Kiki+Koko