Fun Ways to Learn Hiragana

Any time I visit the home of Japanese friends who have kids, I never fail to see a hiragana, katakana, or kanji chart in the bathroom. Get one of these, stick it up on your wall, and in just a minute or two per day, you'll see your hiragana recognition improve. They are all over the place in Japan, but a bit hard to find overseas. Here is the best free, printable hiragana chart I have found online.

Even before children learn how to read, you sometimes hear them playing shiritori. Shiritori is a fun Japanese word game played by children and adults that helps with vocabulary and the Japanese concept that the building blocks of words are syllables, not vowels and consonants. Shiritori literally mean "take the bottom" (Japanese is traditionally written from top to bottom) and is played by taking the last syllable of a word and using it as the first syllable of the next word. Players take turns doing orally this until someone says a word that ends with the syllable "n" because no Japanese words begin with that sound. Unfortunately, Squidoo doesn't deal with Japanese well, so I'm going to explain the image at the right using only romaji (the latin alphabet). Reading from top to bottom, left to right, we have onigiri (riceball), riyuu (reason), untensya (driver), yamasyatsu (mountain shirt), and tsuushin (communication). Rules are flexible, but generally only nouns are accepted and once a word has been used, no one can use it again. See Shiritori on Wikipedia for variations.

You'l often hear Japanese kids playing shiritori in buses and trains, while they wait in line, or whenever they have time to kill. If you want to play shiritori here, add a comment with your word. Because Squidoo chokes on Japanese, please write your Japanese words in romaji.

This is an iOS hiragana app that everyone in my family loves. It's free, it's high energy, and it gives good practice in reading and writing hiragana. What's not to love? Check it out! Japanese-Hiragana app for iOS

Japanese kIds love the memory game (sometimes called concentration) and regularly beat me at it. To play the hiragana memory game, make two copies of these printable hiragana flashcards (pdf from unckel.de) onto some sturdy paper and you're off. Or you can play an online hiragana memory game at easyjapanese.org.
(photo by infinitewhite CC2.0)

If you've spent time in a Japanese school, you've seen these faces on blackboards. It's name, henohenomoheji, comes from the hiragana characters that are used to draw it. I've seen this many, many times, but never on an unerasable surface. Japanese kids are polite that way with their graffiti.