Combination ひらがな

Combo ひらがな are technically two separate 仮名 but they are quite common and considered one sound.

These have two parts, naturally.

The first is a 仮名 from the 'i' row. (ie き, し, ち, に, み, り, etc) + one of the 仮名 from the Y-line - や, ゆ or よ. The 仮名 from the Y-line appears smaller than it's preceding 'i' row 仮名, to indicate that they are attached to one another.

A couple of examples are:

きゃ - kya, じゃ - jya, にゅ - nyu, みょ - myo, りゃ - rya, りゅ - ryu and りょ - ryo

I practiced the combination ひらがな using the linked video.

Koichi-san advises that with the completion of this section about combination ひらがな, the pronunciation of all the ひらがな has been covered for the most part. This will definitely make reading and writing easier!

I have a decent handle on reading and writing already but never bad to get some refresher on the pronunciation of things. Always nice when you sound more natural and less like a gaijin. ;)

I need to get on to bed but looks like the next part of TextFugu is practice actually reading ひらがな. I really look forward to this. Again, I have a great basis with　ひらがな already but my weakness right now is the time it takes me to first convert the symbols to the sounds then if I don't know the word, the additional time it takes me to look it up. Especially during my vacations to California, while shopping at Mitsuwa Marketplace, I found ample opportunities to read product packaging but sometimes it would take me so long to convert what I was reading that sometimes I'd just flip the product over to read the 英語 on the back. Not what I want to have happen!

I'm looking for opportunities to get faster with my ひらがな reading.

**Random observation/brain pick: Another obstacle I often have when trying to read 日本語 product packaging is when a line of text suddenly changes from ひらがな to 漢字. I know very few 漢字 so far so sometimes it made the ひらがな I was able to read up until reaching it virtually useless.

Hoping to change that sooner than later!

またね!