Japanese Hiragana

Press the "Write in ..." button to Write in Hiragana and listen to it. You can write your name in Hiragana!
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Learn to count in Japanese and many other languages! http://scratch.mit.edu/galleries/view/54923
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Learn to write and pronounce Japanese kana. In this project you will learn all the Hiragana characters that are used to write the native Japanese words except words borrowed from other languages such as "coffee" and "butter". These loanwords are written in Katakana and called "gairaigo" that will be covered in another project.
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Press any of the Hiragana character buttons to see a larger display of that character and hear the sound of it. Each Hiragana character is one syllable. Here for each character you will hear the basic syllable and all the voiced and contracted syllables that are possible with that character.
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Press the two green buttons on the bottom left (",°) to see the "voiceless" characters become "voiced"characters.
Characters starting with k, s, t, h will now start with g, z, d,b or p when the two dots or a circle is added to the upper right of the original character.
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Press the three buttons on the right to see the contracted syllable displayed. The second character is usually written a quarter of the regular size. Here in the large display they are the displayed in the regular size due to my limitations.
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You can use the video buttons to have a complete reading of all the Hiragana characters forward or backward, slow or fast. You can pause and restart at any time. You can also press the "Test Yourself" button to see how much you have mastered. Most of all have fun.
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For an excellent reference see "Japanese Step by Step", Gene Nishi, McGraw-Hill, 2001
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Featured 12/14 -18/2010