わ, を, ん: The Last Three Hiragana

The end of the set

You have met 44 hiragana already. Today adds three more, and the set is closed. After this, every sound in modern Japanese has a sign you can read.

The three are わ, を and ん. Two are ordinary syllables. One is a particle with a single job.

わ (wa)

わ is the w-row's only survivor. Long ago Japanese had ゐ (wi) and ゑ (we), but they fell out of use, and today わ stands alone.

It looks like a small loop with a tail curling right. Type wa.

Some words with わ:

• わたし (watashi) — I, me
• かわ (kawa) — river
• にわ (niwa) — garden
• わかる (wakaru) — to understand

A sentence you could actually say: わたしはかわのちかくにすんでいます (watashi wa kawa no chikaku ni sunde imasu) — I live near the river. If you are in your city, you probably have a river or a canal within walking distance. That sentence works anywhere.

を (wo)

を is the odd one. It is pronounced o, exactly like お, but it is written を. In modern Japanese it appears almost exclusively as the object particle — the marker that says "this is what the verb acts on."

• みずをのむ (mizu o nomu) — to drink water
• ほんをよむ (hon o yomu) — to read a book
• パンをたべる (pan o taberu) — to eat bread

Notice that を comes after the noun and before the verb. English puts the object after the verb; Japanese puts it before, with を as the flag.

When you type, を is wo on a kana keyboard, even though you read it as o. This is the one place where your fingers and your mouth disagree. Practise it until the disagreement stops costing you a pause. Type みずをのむ ten times and watch your hands learn it.

ん (n)

The last kana is ん, and it is the only one that is not a full syllable. It is a nasal sound that takes its colour from what follows — more like m before p and b, more like ng before k and g. Do not worry about getting it perfect; Japanese listeners adjust automatically.

The shape is a single stroke sweeping down and curling up. Type nn (or n twice) on most IMEs.

Words with ん:

• ほん (hon) — book
• みかん (mikan) — mandarin orange
• でんしゃ (densha) — train
• こんにちは (konnichiwa) — hello

That last one is worth a note: こんにちは is written with は, not わ, because it is a fixed phrase — the は here is the topic particle, historically part of a longer sentence. It is not a spelling mistake.

Reading them in a line

Try this sentence slowly:

わたしはまいにちでんしゃでかいしゃにいきます。 (watashi wa mainichi densha de kaisha ni ikimasu) — I go to the company by train every day.

You now have every kana in that sentence. Read it once for sound, once for meaning, then type it. If you stumble, it will almost certainly be on を or ん — those are the two that need the extra repetitions.

A note on yesterday

Yesterday's や ゆ よ and ら り る れ ろ gave you the shapes that look most alike — る and ろ especially. Today's three are visually distinct, so the difficulty here is not recognition but the を particle's spelling-versus-sound mismatch.

What you can now do

With わ, を and ん in place, you can read any hiragana word in a children's book, a train sign, or a menu. That is not a small thing. It is the floor of literacy, and you have reached it.

Tomorrow the floor gets a little higher — but in a good way. The kana you know are all voiceless. Japanese has a second layer of marks that turn か into が, さ into ざ, and は into ば or ぱ. You have been reading かばん as kaban for a while without asking why the ば looks different from は. Tomorrow answers that.