Problem with hiragana!

6 comments

1. First, it‘s romaji, not romanji. Common mistake.

   To answer your question: は is pronounced „wa“ whenever it‘s a grammatical particle. Same as を, which is pronounced „o“ as a grammatical particle (or actually always, but it mostly only appears as particles anyways)

2. As those your examples, when “は” which means “is/are”, pronounced “wa”.
   「sth/sb は sth/sb/adjective」(pronounce “wa”, means “is/are”)
   Sorry, I can’t explain well. But I think this problem is not so difficult.
   And Japanese native also confused 「こんにちは」(means “hello”)、「こんばんは」(means ”Good evening”) .
   (こんにちわ、こんばんわ are not correct, but you can see them by Japanese native on Twitter etc. )
   By the way, 「を」 pronounce “wo”.

3. For a historical look at things,

   Historically, the current *h*-row hiragana, はひふへほ, was read with an initial *p*, being *pa pi pu pe po*.

   However, as the centuries moved on, the pronunciation of the consonant shifted, first becoming *fa fi fu fe fo* word initially but *wa wi u we wo* word medially

   This led to them merging with the *w*-row わゐ(う)^1 ゑを. However, words that originally had the *p* still retained their older spellings, thus words such as *kau* “to buy” was still being spelt as 買ふ

   The pronunciation of both medial *p* and *w* would then further shift towards *wa i u e o*

   However, in 1946, the Japanese government issued a spelling reform, replacing all such cases of はひふへほ (and わゐ()ゑを) with わいうえお. Thus, *kau* was respelt as 買う

   Yet, there were three exceptions to the spelling reform : the topic marker は, the object marker をand the directional particle へ. These were deemed too common for their respelling to be properly enforced and this still retain their old spellings, thus leading to the modern idiosyncrasies

   1: *wu* was likely lost by the time kana was developed thus had no kana to represent it

4. は serves a grammatical purpose as the topic marker for the sentence. It has a non-standard pronunciation that it inherited from earlier in the history of the language. You may be relieved to hear that it causes just as much consternation and confusion with Japanese elementary schoolers, as it’s the single biggest spelling oddity in the entire language.

   It shares this oddity with へ, which is pronounced *e* instead of *he* in a specific usage that means “to <the place>”, but that’s not nearly as frequent in use as *wa*.

   Technically *wo* is also odd as it’s most frequently pronounced *o*, but that one’s not consistent across all regional dialects, not to mention the fact that the kana を has exactly one use in the entire language, so it’s not going to be as much of a headache for anyone.

5. Look up cure dolly on YouTube she has lesson on stuff like this and things for every stage of learning.

6. it’s just the way japanese is. same with english. read and read is written the same but said completely different. this is just vice versa for japanese ig lol. は = わ lol