Five New Kana and Your First Real Speed Score

The M row

Five shapes. All of them start from the same skeleton: a horizontal line, and something hanging off it.

ま — two horizontals, then a loop that swings down and closes. Think of a knot tied in a rope.

み — a horizontal, then a sharp bend down and a curl to the right. It looks like the number 3 that got ambitious.

む — a horizontal, a vertical drop, then a small loop that crosses itself at the bottom right. That little tail is the whole character.

め — a curve down and around, then a diagonal slash through it. Nearly identical to ぬ (nu), which you met on day 4, except ぬ has a loop at the end and め just stops.

も — a horizontal, a second horizontal, then a vertical that bends left at the bottom. Like ま but without the loop.

Say them out loud as you read: ま ma, み mi, む mu, め me, も mo. Mouth shapes are easy here — English already has all five sounds. That is a gift. The difficulty in this row is entirely visual.

Where the M row lives

This row shows up constantly in words you already know.

• 目（め）— eye
• 耳（みみ）— ear
• 水（みず）— water
• 物（もの）— thing, object
• 町（まち）— town
• 読む（よむ）— to read
• 飲む（のむ）— to drink
• ご飯（ごはん）— cooked rice, a meal

Notice 飲む（のむ）. The む at the end is not decoration — it is the dictionary form of the verb. Every godan verb ending in -mu looks like this: 読む, 飲む, 住む（すむ）to live somewhere, 休む（やすむ）to rest.

So む is not just a letter. It is a grammatical signal. If you see a word ending in む and it is not a noun, you are almost certainly looking at a verb in its plain form. That is worth more than a mnemonic.

The checkpoint

Here is where you stand. You have covered the vowel row, the K row, the S row, the T row, the N row, the H row, and now the M row. That is 7 rows × 5 characters = 35 kana.

Thirty-five. Out of 46 basic hiragana. You are three quarters of the way through the alphabet and it is day 7 of 14.

But coverage is not the same as speed. You can know a character and still take two full seconds to recognise it. So today you measure.

How to run the speed test

Write all 35 characters on a sheet of paper, in random order, in a single column. No romaji next to them. Then set a timer for 60 seconds and read down the column out loud, saying the sound for each one.

Mark where you stop.

That number is your baseline. It will be lower than you hope. Most people manage somewhere between 20 and 35 in a minute on their first attempt, and that is completely normal — you are not slow, you are just new.

The point is not the score. The point is that from today you have a number, and numbers can move. Run the same test tomorrow before you learn anything new and see whether the M row has settled in.

A few things to watch for while you read:

• め versus ぬ. If you hesitate, you are not alone. The difference is that final loop.
• ま versus も. The loop on ま is the tell. も has none.
• む versus す. Both have a vertical and a crossing tail. む has the horizontal on top; す does not.

If you are reading in your city on a train, this test takes exactly one stop. That is the whole commitment.

A note on the H row

One thing from yesterday that is worth keeping: は is read wa when it is a particle and ha everywhere else. If you tripped on that during the test, it is not a reading failure — it is a grammar fact, and grammar facts take longer than shapes.

What is actually happening

Recognition speed improves through retrieval, not review. Reading the chart again feels productive and does almost nothing. Being forced to produce a sound from a shape, under mild time pressure, is what moves the number.

So the test is not a test. It is the practice.

Run it once today. Write the score down somewhere you will see it tomorrow. Then we add eight more characters, and the interesting part begins: two rows whose members look enough alike to fool you at speed.