Hiragana: Small Kana
You may notice that there are many sounds in Japanese I mentioned in my lesson Basic Sounds that you still do not know how to write in hiragana. This lesson will clear up the rest of the sounds in the Japanese language.
Small kana are kana characters that are half the size of a normal character and alter the sounds of kana around it. Since they are half-size you write them at the bottom left of the base line in horizontal writting or upper right in vertical writting. The same goes for the pronounciation marks which I will also talk about in this lesson.
First, let's look at the first three small kana. As you can see, these are miniature versions of the hiragana from the Y row. With these, you can take any kana that is a consonant plus "i" such as "ki" "bi" or "mi" and merge it with a small Y kana to create a consonant + "y" + vowel sound. All of these sounds are pronounced as only one syllable.
Here are three examples of this. The first one is the hiragana for "ki" plus the small hiragana for "ya." So the pronounciation of the consonant is Kya. It is pronounced as one syllable.
The second one is the hiragana for "bi" plus the small kana for "yu." The pronounciation is "byu." Some of the sounds made with small kana don't exist in English, but are not very difficutl to pronounce.
The thrid one is "mi" plus "yo" and so the pronounciation becomes "myo." Again another sound not in English but not too hard to say.
There are also 3 irregular combinations. They are all pretty simple though.
As you can see, "shi" and one of these small kana changes to "sh" + the vowel from the small kana. "Ji" plus a small kana becomes "j" plus the vowel. And lastly, "chi" plus a small kana becomes "ch" plus the vowel from the small kana.
That's it for the small Y row. Those are the hardest of the small kana because there are so many combinations, but that also makes them very useful.
The last small kana is the small "tsu." The small "tsu" produces the double consonant sound I explained in my Basic Sounds lesson.
When a small "tsu" hiragana is placed in front of another hiragana starting with a consonant, it doubles that sound. This is romanized as two consonants one by one. In romanization, though, "tsts" becomes "tts" "shsh" becomes "ssh" and "chch" becomes "tch." Here are some examples of the small "tsu."
The first examples is the word for school. As you can see, there is a small "tsu" plus a "k" consonant. This creates a double "k" sound. Also, don't forget the "kou" at the end is pronounced "ko" with a long "o."
The second example is the past tense of the verb "tatsu" (to stand). The small "tsu" comes before a "t" sound, so we get a double "t" sound instead. Many past tense verb conjugations end in "tta."
The thrid example is the past tense of the I adjective "chiisai" (small). Again, it ends in a small "tsu" plus a "t" sound making it "tt."
A small "tsu" will never occur before "n" "m" "y" or "w" sounds. If you ever see "nn" or "mm," it means there is a final "n`" sound before the "n" or "m."
Japanese punctuation marks are a bit different from ours.
As you can see, the period and the comma look different from ours. The period is a small circle and the comma is a small slash down and right and it does not go below the bottom of the line. The exclamation point and question mark look the same, but they aren't used often in formal written Japanese. They are used frequently in colloquial Japanese, but Japanese already has a way to show if a sentence is interrogative or exclamitory without the use of such marks. You may be happy to hear there are no strict rules for comma. You basically use them when you want to clarify the meaning of a sentence, but they are not manditory.
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