Japanese Pronunciation Using Hiragana

To day is all about pronunciation!!!!!!! The pronunciation of "kana". A "kana" is basically one of the "letters" (well their not really letters but it's more easier to understand them in this way) of the Japanese "alphabet". The first 5 to learn are:

• a - is pronounced like the "a" in "car".
• i - is pronounced like "eeee", or the "ey" in "key".
• u - is pronounced "ooh", like saying "ohh ahh" when fireworks are going off.
• e - is pronounced "eh", like the "e" in "egg" or "elephant".
• o - is pronounced "oh", like in "oh my gosh".

The first five hiragana are the most important five to learn. They set the foundation for every other kana in the entire hiragana alphabet.

The hardest column of kana, for me, was the "r" (ra, ri, ru, re, ro) this is because it doesn't sound like an English r. It’s part R (around 75%), part L (about 20%) and strangely enough, part D (give this about 5%). Complicated or what. 

Then we went on to combo hiragana as you can see in the chart above it is just adding on a ya, yu, yo sound on to the kana. so pretty self explanatory. (in other words its getting late and I can't be bothered to go in more depth of an explanation :3)

Then comes the Dakuten. this is when you add two dashes or a circle to a kana to make it sound different. (Again it is shown in the chart above.) For example if you taken to the "ta" and add dakuten the sound changes to "da".

So to day I have hopefully learnt all of the pronunciations of the hiragana chart. yay, what's next?!