I’ve recently started learning Japanese, and am getting used to reading hiragana. What I’m wondering is why some characters look similar when they don’t sound similar at all? For example “ke” is only missing the little loop before it’s “ha”, and even “ni” uses the same first component. The same with “nu” and “me”. I expected similar looking characters to use either the same consonant or the same vowel, like with “ru” and “ro”, which would speed up my learning process.
I am prepared for the answer “no reason, it just is like that”, but would be delighted if someone knows anything about this! It would really help my memorisation if I have some method to link the characters together in a logical way. Thanks in advance to anyone commenting 🙂
12 comments
That applies to any language though. What about “n” and “h” for English? They look the exact same (apart from a line) and sound very different (not even using the same tongue movements or whatever they’re called to produce the sound). There really is no reason they do this, it kind of just happens.
Edit: you’re gonna have a lot of fun with katakana 🙂
In the alphabet is the same, “b d p q” is very similar and I did have problem with that when I was young. Same for n h, and in Swedish ö o and a å ä.
It will get easier with time.
its just a coincidence. hiragana comes from cursive forms of chinese characters, most similar looking components are just coincidences.
if you look at [this](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana#/media/File%3AOrigin_of_Hiragana_.png) image, you can see that the left component of け comes from the radical “言” whereas the left component of は comes from the radical “氵”.
hiragana wasnt designed with the idea that similar sounding characters should look the same.
Technically no more similar than letters of any alphabet.
It just seems more similar when you haven’t mastered the language. If you were to get out a notebook and wrote every single katakana and hiragana letter a hundred times a day for a month straight, each character would become so specific in your mind and in your muscle memory, you could never mix any of them up ever again. And you’d stop seeing the similarities unless you’d really try.
But people who learn a foreign language rarely have the discipline to grind stuff to that extent. So they look similar for a while as you slowly build up the mastery of the language and immerse yourself.
Natives got all the hard grind out of the way when they grew up immersed and went through school.
Foreigners are gonna take longer, that’s just how it is.
Dude, just look at this: b p q d
Or even: o 0
I can even go as far as: i l 1
All of these are also pretty similar, but we’re able to instantly recognize it anyways. Just keep reading and practicing and it’ll be the same for Japanese as well.
Actual reason: hiragana are derived from cursive kanji and the simplification process involved a similar path for the brush strokes of certain parts (in this case the 訁 in 計 (け), the 氵 in 波 (は), and the 亻 in 仁(に)). Look at [this chart](https://images.app.goo.gl/C58to3BPfSsUpk9W7) for more details.
Yeah sorry. Whenever I see posts like this, the only thing that goes in my mind is ‘Have you met English’?
They’ve done it specifically to annoy you. Didn’t you know? 😉
Anyway – as others have said – it’s derived from a simplification of Chinese characters. Here’s a nice introduction to the language that covers some of its history and current features. [https://youtu.be/x9-e_3GHrzw](https://youtu.be/x9-e_3GHrzw)
PS. You might as well learn katakana at the same time as hiragana – they use the same sounds, so use each sound as a mental index to the two character representations (bit like learning upper & lower case alphabetic characters at the same time). Also some [guidance & resources](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/s5mtva/comment/ht1lo0x/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) you may find useful in your initial learning stages.
the way they they turn cursive chinese into hiragana is far-fetched. It doesn’t even resemble the original kanji like へ and 部
[deleted]
Sometimes their features come from similar components.
め is from 女 which has a め reading. あ is very similar: the “pretzel” has a longer stroke through it, with a horizontal stroke. It comes from 安, which also has an extra horizontal stroke through 女, plus some dots. ぬ comes from 奴. The little loop that is added to め to form ぬ basically captures the entire “folding stool” on the right side. Now how that got associated with the sound “nu” is a good question. 奴 has a ぬ reading in names, again.
Too add some more; there were many [japanese script reforms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_script_reform).
It consisted of lists of how the pronounced speech and the written word should be connected.
Be it hiragana usage, kanji, proper strokes, they had quite a few instances where they restructured the language, or at least tried to.