How to Write Hiragana: Getting the Shapes Right and an Order to Practise In

In 2015, the Japan Foundation’s Japanese-Language Institute in Kansai released a free app called Hiragana Memory Hint. It teaches each hiragana with a picture that hints at its shape and sound, plus quizzes and a chart that plays each character’s sound. It is a tool for learning to recognise hiragana. Writing them is not part of it.

I think that is a sensible split. Recognising a character and writing it by hand are different skills. It is quite possible to read all 46 basic hiragana and still find that your own handwriting looks unlike the characters in your textbook. This post is for learners of Japanese who want to write hiragana by hand. I’ll go through where learners tend to stumble, how to look at the shapes, and the order and pace I would practise in.

Read first, then write soon after

Should you learn to read hiragana first, or to write them? My answer is: read first, but start writing soon after.

Reading is quicker to learn. With mnemonics like the ones above, you can recognise a row of five characters in a day. If you wait to write until you can read all 46, though, the shapes stay vague. Writing a character makes you notice how many strokes it has, where each one starts and how they meet. I think that is what fixes the shape in memory. Research on how writing by hand helps children recognise letters is covered in What Tracing Practice Does.

So I would learn to read a row, then write the same row within a day or two.

Where learners tend to stumble

Writing a character in one continuous line. People used to the Latin alphabet often join strokes that are meant to be separate. あ is three strokes, お is three, and ふ is four. Lifting the pen between strokes is part of the shape. When you learn a new character, count its strokes first.

Stroke direction. Most strokes run from top to bottom and from left to right. Horizontal lines go left to right, vertical lines go top to bottom. A few characters have strokes in an order learners don’t expect. These are covered in Hiragana Stroke Order: The Characters Learners Most Often Get Wrong.

How strokes end. Japanese handwriting distinguishes three ways a stroke can end: tome, where the pen stops; hane, where it flicks out; and harai, where it sweeps away and lifts. In the shapes taught in Japanese schools, the first stroke of い ends with a small upward flick, and the first stroke of こ ends with a small hook pointing towards the second. These endings show which way the hand moves next. You don’t need to exaggerate them, but it helps to know they are there.

Sitting on a baseline. Latin letters stand on a line, with some reaching up and some hanging down. Each Japanese character fills a square of its own, all the same size, with the character in the middle. Writing hiragana on a line, like English, tends to make them uneven in size. Paper with squares makes this easier. Small characters such as っ and ゃ are the exception, and where they go is covered in Where to Write Small っ, ゃ, ゅ and ょ.

Shapes that are too angular. Hiragana grew out of cursive forms of kanji, and many of their lines are soft curves. Learners whose hands are used to print letters often turn those curves into corners. の, あ and め are good characters to check.

Print and handwriting look different. In some fonts, parts of き and さ are joined, and そ looks like it has two strokes. Handwriting follows the textbook shape. See Hiragana in Print vs Handwriting.

Look-alikes. ぬ and め, わ, れ and ね, and は and ほ each differ by one stroke. Ways to tell them apart are in Hiragana That Look Alike. In katakana, シ and ツ, and ソ and ン, are the classic pairs, covered in シ vs ツ and ソ vs ン.

How to look at a shape

When I look at a model character, I find it helps to divide its square into four with a cross, one line down the middle and one across.

• Where each stroke starts and ends. Does it start above the horizontal line, or below it? Does it end left of the vertical line, or right?
• Where strokes cross the centre lines. The point where a curve crosses the middle tells you a lot about its shape.
• The empty spaces. Look at the gaps between strokes as well as the strokes. If a gap is much bigger or smaller than in the model, the character looks off.

Then write it in the same size of square and compare. One or two points of difference at a time is plenty to fix.

What order to practise in

For reading, going row by row through the gojūon chart, あいうえお, かきくけこ and so on, works well, because the chart is built on sounds.

For writing, I think it is easier to start with characters made of few, simple strokes, such as い, こ, し, つ and く, and leave the ones with loops and crossings, such as あ, ぬ and ね, for a little later. A full order grouped by line shape is in What Order to Teach Hiragana In. If you would rather keep to the chart for writing as well, that is fine too. The important thing is to practise the same characters you are learning to read.

After the 46 basic characters, move on to the voiced forms such as が and ぱ, which add marks to characters you already know. See How to Write Dakuten and Handakuten. Katakana comes after that.

How many a day

For an adult learner, I think around five new characters a day is a pace you can keep up: one row of the chart. Write the day’s characters several times, then write each character from the earlier days once. At that pace, with a few days set aside just for review, you get through the basic 46 in roughly two weeks.

Ten minutes every day does more than an hour once a week, I believe. Writing is a movement of the hand, and the hand learns by repetition spread over time.

Say the sound as you write

When you write a character, say its sound out loud. It links the shape in your hand to the sound in your mouth, and you are practising reading at the same time. If you are not sure of a sound, listen to it first and then write.

Practising in StudyX Japanese Letters Tracer

StudyX Japanese Letters Tracer is an iPhone and iPad app for practising the shapes and stroke order of hiragana and katakana. The screen has almost no words on it, only icons and kana, so it works the same whatever language you speak.

The app opens on a gojūon chart of the 46 basic hiragana. Tap a character, and its model line grows one stroke at a time in stroke order. Write one stroke with your finger or a stylus and lift it, and the next stroke of the model appears. The buttons at the top of the practice screen switch to the voiced forms and to katakana, so は leads to ば, ぱ, ハ, バ and パ. The arrow buttons at the bottom move to the previous or next character in gojūon order.

The buttons on the right are the ones I would use most as a learner.

• The speaker plays the character’s sound, only when you tap it. Tap it before you write and say the sound with it.
• The cross guide shows dotted lines through the middle of the character, the same four-way division as above. Use it to check where strokes start, end and cross.
• Size switches the model between large, medium and small. Start large, where the movement is easy to see, and move to smaller sizes once the shape is steady.
• Redo clears your lines and starts the animation again from the first stroke.

There is no scoring and no right-or-wrong judgement. You compare your lines with the model yourself. I think that suits the way of looking at shapes described above.

It covers 142 characters: hiragana and katakana with their dakuten and handakuten forms. Small kana such as っ and ゃ, combined sounds such as きゃ, and the long vowel mark ー are not included. Small kana have the same shapes as their full-size versions, though, so once you can write つ, や, ゆ and よ, you can write the small ones too. Where they go in the square is covered in the post on small kana linked above.

It is a one-time purchase with no ads and no in-app purchases. On iPhone it runs in landscape. For a first session, see Getting Started with StudyX Japanese Letters Tracer.