Hiragana is a Japanese syllabary. It is part of the Japanese writing system along with katakana and kanji. Hiragana characters are used primarily for native Japanese words and grammatical elements. There are 46 basic hiragana characters, some of which can be modified by adding one of two diacritical marks, dakuten or handakuten. This creates an additional 25 characters to add to the hiragana syllabary.
Dakuten are hiragana characters you already know plus a small “quotation mark”. Handakuten are just like daukuten, but use a “little circle” instead. By adding one of these little marks to the hiragana character, the pronunciation of the character changes. For example, adding a dakuten to the character は (ha) changes its pronunciation to ば (ba). Similarly, adding a handakuten to は (ha) changes its pronunciation to ぱ (pa).
To help you learn these characters, here is a basic hiragana chart showing the modern 46 characters plus the 2 archaic characters ゐ (wi) and ゑ (we) for a total of 48 hiragana characters:
| a | i | u | e | o | |
| ∅ | あ | い | う | え | お |
| k | か | き | く | け | こ |
| g | が | ぎ | ぐ | げ | ご |
| s | さ | し | す | せ | そ |
| z | ざ | じ | ず | ぜ | ぞ |
| t | た | ち | つ | て | と |
| d | だ | ぢ | づ | で | ど |
| n | な | に | ぬ | ね | の |
| h | は | ひ | ふ | へ | ほ |
| b | ば | び | ぶ | べ | ぼ |
| p | ぱ | ぴ | ぷ | ぺ | ぽ |
| m | ま | み | む | め | も |
| y | や | ゆ | よ | ||
| r | ら | り | る | れ | ろ |
| w | わ | ゐ | ゑ | を | |
| ん (n) |
On the chart, all of the dakuten and handakuten hiragana are in bold. You should also notice that not all of the base hiragana will have diacritical mark variants. However, by adding diacritical marks to some characters, hiragana is able to represent every sound in the Japanese vocabulary.
In the past, dakuten were used less often and their original purpose was to clarify Chinese kanji pronunciation. Interestingly, handakuten was created by Portuguese Jesuits who needed help transcribing certain Japanese writings, which at time didn’t differentiate /h/, /b/, and /p/ sounds.
How to Type Dakuten on Keyboard
Typing dakuten and handakuten on a keyboard is relatively simple. First step is you need to be using a Japanese keyboard. There are lots of different ones you can download on your phone. If you are on using Windows, then try Windows Japanese IME.
On your phone, all you need to do is press the dakuten key( ゛小゜) after you type the base kana. It is usually located on the lower left of the keyboard. If you are using an IME then just type the word in Romaji (English letters) and it will auto change it to the correct kana.
Now that you know the basics of hiragana with dakuten, you can begin learning Japanese. Good luck!
