This is a companion activity to accompany the 「しゃしゅしょ」writing lessons! Now, you don’t have to compile these vocabulary words on your own as we have you covered with a useful list of vocabulary to help you differentiate 拗音, youon, and 五十音, gojuuon!

こんにちにゃあ！Welcome to Kiki+Koko: Let’s NihonGO!! Online! We’re your hosts, your guides to Japanese language and culture, Kiki and Koko! When practising writing in any language, it’s useful to pinpoint the exact characters and write just those to focus on those skills, but as you progress, it can be even more rewarding and useful to do a bit more than that. We always mention it can be useful to apply your hiragana and youon knowledge to vocabulary wordsーand even sentences!ーbut that would include the effort o compiling vocabulary words and then being sure whether or not those words were trustworthy or spelt correctly. The days of compiling vocabulary on your own are a thing of the past! Introducing: Japanese Hiragana Reading + Vocabulary Activity! Before, you would have to spend hours scrubbing through the internet in search of words that only used the characters you knew and were practising. Now, with just a click and a scroll, you unlock vocabulary you can use to practise reading and writing along with some fun vocabulary! You’re a busy student/visitor, and your time is better spent actually revising rather than searching for the right tools. We’ll continue to do our best to provide the tools and resources you need every step of the way on your Japanese language learning journey. With just seven payments of $0.00, you’ll have your very own digital flashcards, accessible from anywhere via The Internet.

For the very latest, you can navigate to the 平仮名の筆順 | How to Write Hiragana

But, before we do jump into this, we want to be sure you’re not diving too deep before you’re ready. Wouldn’t want to go off the deep end without the proper knowledge. Have you already learnt to read and write hiragana gojuuon? If you haven’t, we recommend you have a go at that before jumping into hiragana youon, as well as dakuten and handakuten. These building blocks will help you build the foundation of not only the language itself, but also the methods that work the best for you. In general, human brains tend to function similarly when it comes to learning, but sometimes it takes different perspectives that can be formed over time. Throughout our lessons, we usually give tips and hints that could be the key to making certain concepts click in your mind. Even once concepts begin to make sense, it’s still a matter of time before you’ll end up feeling like these characters are properly concrete in your mind and a bit more time before they feel as second nature as your native alphabet. So, even though it’s important and useful to challenge yourself, it’s important not to try to jump halfway up the staircase on your first go. Sure, you could strain yourself trying to go up three stair steps at a time, but then you’re liable to trip and fall. And nobody wants to fall down the stairs. Then, you’ll just end up having to climb back up one by one in pain. So, take it from us, if you’re not ready for the lesson, you can still have a look for fun, but don’t ever feel discouraged or try to push yourself beyond realistic challenges as to keep these lessons useful and enjoyable.

Speaking of which, if you would like a go at the previous lessons to be sure you’re on the right track and to revise previous ones, you can have a look at them right here:

And this brings us to the challenge! You can use this activity to practise reading, writing, and a bit of vocabulary along the way. That’s right, practising three skills at once! You’ll be unstoppable!! This will cover the hiragana from 【あ】through 【しゃしゅしょ】in the gojuuon order. That way, you can focus on the characters you’re already learning, or have learnt, without bogging yourself down with new characters quite yet. If you don’t quite have the stroke order properly memorised, and you’d like to practise writing, you can open a separate tab with our stroke order lessons. We really recommend you use this as an opportunity for writing, and even if you’re confident in your characters, it can be helpful to make sure your handwriting improves. There’s something very fun and impressive about nice handwriting that is timeless and rewarding.

So, we’ve created a 12 word activity to help you recall your hiragana.  In this mini-activity, you basically have digital flashcards. By clicking on each of them, you’ll reveal a kanji (or katakana) 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.

No worries, we’ll keep it simple and stick to a few words that use only the hiragana: 【あいうえお】through【しゃしゅしょ】!

Ready? Let’s NihonGO!!

As a reminder, these are just a few vocabulary words. Knowing hiragana from あ through しょ opens up a HUGE amount of words to you! Some are less common then others, but are useful and interesting to help you connect some concepts to your writing, and recognising the characters in new configurations. We hope you get the most that you can out of these digital flashcards~!

[ピント｜Focus]: We’ll be providing you with a focus on 「しゃしゅしょ」 vs 「しや、しゆ、しよ」Be sure when you read and write these to focus on the differences between these very similar characters and their 拗音、youon, counterparts.

Take this! It’s dangerous to go alone.

Wowee, that was a lot of useful vocabulary! You’ll hopefully be able to consider yourself a 学者、がくしゃ, after that set of character recognition flashcards! Did you do well with them? Was it still a bit difficult to differentiate between 拗音、youon, and 五十音、gojuuon? Well, hopefully, this will help you focus on the differences and similarities for future writing, reading, and identification. And, you also have a few more words to use in sentences! We recommendーwith the aid of the proper stroke orderーthat you take some time to create your own sentences! We included mostly 名詞, めいし, otherwise known as nouns, so it should be a bit easier to integrate into basic sentence structures. And, besides, there’s plenty of previous lessons with 形容詞、けいようし, or adjectives, and 動詞、どうし、verbs, which you can use to create little stories or full communications. It’s very useful even if you’re just using it to practise your hiragana. And, no worries, as we’re always adding new content and lessons to assist you in your Japanese language learning.(And, if you want the VERY latest, even before we organise the articles into their sections on the site and even before they’re organised on our Pinterest boards, you can go the category: 文法｜Grammar! And, better yet, if you’d like to be sure you have the latest hiragana writing lessons before they’re categorised elsewhere in a prettier way, you can just get the list of the latest to access them quickly in the category: 平仮名の筆順 | How to Write Hiragana. And, with that, we hope we’ve given you all of the resources you need to make the most of your current study time! We’ll continue to add more and more for you as the days and weeks roll on during your Japanese language learning journey!

We hope this is a helpful revision / study tool! But, maybe all of this wasn’t quite clicking if you hadn’t been with us from the very beginning. Feel free to take a look at our Reading and Writing sections to revise / review / study, as it’s essential to learning any language. If you want to make sure your Japanese language survival kit is stocked with the latest tools, you can make sure you stay up to date by subscribing to the Electronic Mailing List of Tomorrow, today, found usually at the bottom of the site page or the sidebar on desktop. You’ll get the latest tools and resources to surviving in Japanese language in straight to your inbox. That’s articles, videos, podcasts, and more!

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Speaking of which, we want to continue to ensure your steps to success in your Japanese language learning goals, whether you want to just learn a bit for fun or become fluent. You can ensure the continuation of the creation of new and even better content by leaving a TIP in the TIP♡JAR to keep it going. But! You can also support the content when you purchase any artwork from ieindigoeast.redbubble.com (making sure to use our special redbubble link). But, if there’s something that isn’t from our theme, you can always drop Indigo East a ‘Bubblemail’ if you want to specify that you would like it to go towards this content. Or for long or even short term contributions, you can join our Patreon where our gracious host, Indigo East, usually posts behind-the-scenes, sneak-peeks, exclusive content, and more. And, we join in as well! Again, if you’d like to support  our survival and the creation of more content to be made available to as many people as possible, you can also share the content! You can easily share via Twitter and Pinterest where you can retweet and repin respectively without even having to type! Gestures like that go a long way, and we appreciate it. We just want to do our best to fulfil our mission.

Thank you for joining us! We hope that you continue with us on this adventure, and we appreciate that you’ve chosen us to assist you on your Japanese learning journey.

Stay Safe!!
♡Kiki+Koko

     
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