こんにちにゃあ！Welcome to Kiki+Koko: Let’s NihonGO!! We’re your guides to Japanese language and culture! We’re here to provide for you the tools you need to trek the mountain of Japanese language! When learning a language, reading is paramount. But, maybe you’ve been here with us since the beginning, and some lessons feel like they’re leaving you if you haven’t been back as often as you should to revise/study. But, no worries! That’s why we’re here! We’ll throw down our grappling hook of practice and pull you back up to the ledge of 【まみむめも】

Each hiragana lesson is a milestone, but most of us are human, and memory can be fallible, and a refresher in a useful situation like reading can save your memories! Well, rather, these words will anchor these concepts to the characters. It’s about associating ideas. And, when you’re out in the thick of it, being able to recall characters amongst others is also about identifying them altogether, not just one by one. So, this should be a fun challenge for beginners!

Also! When you get to the next stroke order lesson, you can use these to review! Use this to write them over and over, but actually have something to anchor those to—it gives you something more than just sounds to work with. And, while of course, calligraphy itself is quite fun, but when you’ve written hiragana in your notebook over one hundred times, you might want to add a bit more to your learning. Of course, saying them aloud whilst writing is very helpful to multitask with your reading as well. (For this, we recommend opening multiple windows or using your phone as a cheat sheet.)

But, here, we’ve done a lot of the work for you! We’ve created a 20 word activity to help you recall your hiragana. (That’s over 20 when not even including the other definitions and the different kanji) In this mini-activity, you basically have digital flashcards. By clicking on each of them, you’ll reveal a kanji version that defines the meaning of the word, and of course, the translation in English. Many words have several homophones, so we’ve just included some common meanings as not to bog your studies down.

In the first portion, we’ll keep it simple and stick to a few words that use only the latest hiragana:【まみむめも】, but in the latter portion, we’ll make things interesting!! 

Ready? Let’s NihonGO!!

Whew! That’s all of the words with the latest hiragana, but here’s the tricky part! We’re travelling back to the beginning of the map and circling around. This is where we include some previous hiragana. Because, of course, spelunking this far into the depths of hiragana means there is a smattering of Japanese words that include all of the characters so far—and that’s without the extra marks we’ll talk about in another lesson! So, with all of these characters in your pack, you’ll be sure to have a great grasp of a lot more words.

Alrighty, so let’s carry on!

How to pronounce and use 勉強 in this Japanese Word of the Week

And that’s 20 more vocabulary words that you can use whilst 勉強しています!! Very easy reading opportunities are a bit difficult to find, and in our travels, we found a lot of people who simply wanted exercises to practise reading the hiragana they already knew. But, of course, it was muddled with other characters they had not studied yet. We give the building blocks to create a mountain of learning from the baby steps a lot of people need. But, these baby steps are twenty metres tall, as you’re not only practising reading, but also learning vocabulary. (In order to really properly memorise them, simply refresh the page each time to clear them, and come back to them multiple times.) Also, a lot of these words, you can use to adapt to past and future lessons about particles! You can already use these in our guide to creating a simple sentence.

There will be many more grammar guides in future to prepare you to create what you need as basic sustenance to survive out there on your own, but for now, here’s the basic tools you need to get by with a basic sentence structure where you can use some of these nouns. (The next lesson deals with verbs)

Learning a language is all about the tools you have in your pack! If you have more words stored to use, you’ll have more to practise, even at a beginning level. While we only give you enough for you to pack for the week, the point is to pack as much information in a course of time you feel comfortable with– While time table goals are lovely and can motivate you, remember, there are people who are completely fluent, passing language tests that even some doctors in Japan can’t pass, who don’t feel like they’re completely native speaking even when everyone around them thinks otherwise.

So, set real achievable goals for yourself and celebrate the little milestones! You’ll be a lot happier along the way if you do.

And, we can help you with those goals even if you’re not quite to this level of hiragana, yet! For your convenience, you can access all of the previous hiragana lessons right here:

Read, Write, and Revise with Kiki+Koko: Let’s NihonGO!!:
                                   

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