@kikikokoNihonGO

みんなさま、こんにちにゃあぁっ～！Welcome to Kiki+Koko: Let’s NihonGO!! Online, the blog, brought to you via The Internet through The World Wide Web. We’re Kiki and Koko, your guides to Japanese language and culture! Even in a digital age of tablets, computers, PDAs, facsimile machines, and walkmans, the simple art of writing is an essential part of learning and functioning in a language. The muscle memory assists you in learning the characters, and we hate to use this argument, but…everybody’s doing it. That’s right. In Japan, literacy is one of the highest in the world! But, this means that even in a language where there can still be struggles in learning to read and write, as with any language, it’s more than the norm to know how to read and write.

We do want to mention, of course, that even though everyone’s reading and writing in Japan, that doesn’t lessen your Japanese writing accomplishment! They had the benefit of learning early on and practising every day of their lives. Think of how difficult it may have been to learn to write in your own native language for someone from a language other than yours. It’s stepping outside of your own comfort zone and out into new territory!

And in that, each character you learn is one more than you knew before! There are people who think to themselves, Oh, I would love to know how to speak, read, and write in Japanese.. and, then they never even try, or they give up after the first few characters. We’ve seen this case so many times… which is why we’re adamantly trying our best to facilitate a great learning environment for you! We want to give you the tools you need to learn at your own pace. Many university classrooms only give their students two weeks to learn hiragana or they simply throw them into reading immediately. Perhaps this works for someone, maybe? But, we think it would just cause a case of the collywobbles. That isn’t to say that failing in front of people is the worst thing in the world. In fact, it’s very helpful to fail or you won’t learn. But, some learning techniques just don’t work for everyone especially in such a short span of time.

Here, you can take all of the time you fancy! And, by the end of this, you’ll be able to write words like:

ま
まま
まめ
みみ
め
むみ

You can practise writing whilst learning new vocabulary~! It’s a win-win!

Well, more realistically, you’ll be able to use these to practise your hiragana whilst also learning useful vocabulary words to store in your mind! It can be helpful to multitask like this even though repetition alone of the character is helpful. But, it helps combining them in a group for actual future usage.

We can’t believe we’re getting so close to the end of 五十音順, gojuuon jun. We can’t believe we’re getting so close to the end of 五十音順, gojuuon jun, and whilst that’s a huge accomplishment, there’s no lack of learning in the future as there are more characters to learn, which you probably already knew if you’ve been here since the beginning. But, we can’t assume that this is or isn’t your very first article you’ve uncovered here at Kiki+Koko: Let’s NihonGO!! Online.

It would definitely be helpful to cover the very basics so you can get the most you can out of this. Like, what is hirgana, anyway?  We have you covered with: How Do You Write in Japanese? | Japanese Writing System Demystified and maybe our spiel earlier about literacy in Japan didn’t quite convince you that learning to write correctly is important. Blam!:  🤔Do I REALLY need to learn Stroke Order? | 6 Reasons Why {or Why not?} | What is Stroke Order?   

一緒に書きましょうか。Shall we write together? 頑張りましょうね！Let’s do our best!

Now! We can get to the writing portion where our good friendo, QUIZBO™, our favourite quiz generating robot computer who also functions as a very useful display generator, will be using the latest technology to show you how to write 「まみむめも」– This will be with the age old device we know as… numbers and arrows.

Of course, it SEEMS simple, but this is probably the best method created to properly show each character’s stroke order whilst also giving a good view of the actual character’s overall look. Whilst you’ll be able to see how the character will look through each step of the process, we’ll also be there with helpful hints!

How to use stroke order

Before we properly begin, we figured it would be best to give you a quick overview on how to read these diagrams. For each character, there’s mostly 3-4 strokes that are written in a specific order. Each number signifies which stroke should come first. Start where the circled number begins and write the stroke in the direction in which the arrow is pointing. If you want to see what each step looks like and what yours should look like at that stage, then take a look at the squares on the right. They squares are ordered up to down and right to left in Japanese order. And, that’s the whole of it!

It’s time to equip your pencils, grab a pen, take out a notepad, a digital device and a stylus, anything you need to write safely and comfortably. Let’s write hiragana! 

Let’s NihonGO!!

Kiki+Koko’s Helpful Hints:
Hoho, this looks very familiar to a character we’ve already learnt in the past! 【ほ】with a few HUGE differences to watch out for! Of course, an entire stroke isn’t there, but on stroke 3, make sure when writing 【ま】that the stroke comes from above the strokes from 1 and 2. Whilst it has similarities to other characters that are important to point out, definitely make sure to differentiate. Always spot the differences between characters to make sure you can easily tell them apart.

Kiki+Koko’s Helpful Hints:
Well, there isn’t much outside of the diagram that we can think of that would need an explanation. If you do have any questions, though, feel free to leave a comment below!

Kiki+Koko’s Helpful Hints:
This is a fun one with a lot of fun strokes, so definiely keep an eye out for that stroke 2! The loop is sometimes a little closer to the bottom slope depending on how round you make it. It’s sometimes slightly more or less curvy in different fonts, but generally,【む】is a very straight line on the second stroke right before the loop.

Kiki+Koko’s Helpful Hints:
Oh, it looks like we have a character similar to one we’ve learnt before! Remember 【ぬ】? Well, it looks like he got his mullet cut and became 【め】… Or, maybe the other way around? At any rate! These are two you’ll definitely have to try to differentiate. Maybe think nu-wave when you think of 【ぬ】Or, whatever you need to help. It’s oddly a much simpler character than it might look with only two strokes. And, this also looks like a bowl of ramen with chopsticks. 

Kiki+Koko’s Helpful Hints:
Well, technically, it’s almost as if you’ve seen this before, but not quite! 【し】doesn’t quite make the same hook that 【も】has, so definitely keep an eye out for that. Making a nice hook on stroke 1 is important to this character and can often be exaggerated in fonts. 

And that’s that! 「まみむめも」! Five more characters you didn’t know before that you can write now! Well… that is getting a bit ahead of it. Of course, you’ll need to repeat writing them a bit more before officially knowing how to write them from memory. But, that’s still a huge step closer!

In this lesson, there were definitely a lot of very similar character to previous ones! And, that’s very common with a lot of characters even when we get to even more hiragana, katakana, and eventually 漢字, kanji. This can be very helpful because having these set patterns can make them easier to memorise, making the task of learning to write oddly not as difficult as it could be. It’s just always very important to keep an eye out for the little differences when you’re out and about. Feel free to take a look at the previous lessons to revise/study, as well.

Repetition is the key to memorisation. Repetition is the key to memorisation.

Repetition is a huge key to memorisation. However, there’s another key as well, and that is connecting them with other concepts. That’s why we created this special hiragana activity! Whilst writing the words, you’re connecting the characters to concepts that will further ingrain them into your muscle memory and connect them to different psychological schema to make sense of it all. So, with every activity and every scroll of a page, you’re that much closer!

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 so much for learning with us! We can’t wait to see you again!
♡Kiki+Koko