Learn Hiragana - Lesson 1: あ い う え お (Stroke Order Tutorial for Beginners)

Hi everyone, welcome to Language Script Academy. My name is Chris and today we'll be starting off our first lesson in Japanese Hiragana, the foundation for Japanese writing. In this video, we're going to learn how to write the first five characters and I'll be guiding you through how to write each one step by step while focusing on the correct stroke order, which is really important in Japanese writing. So, let's get started. You just need a pen and a piece of paper and we're all set to begin this journey. So, to give you the big picture, there's a total of 46 different Hiragana characters in the Japanese language. I know it looks like it's a lot, but together we're going to be able to learn all of them and I'm confident that with each video, once you go through them, you will be able to master the Japanese writing very quickly. So, in this video, we'll be focusing on these five characters. Let's get started. Okay, so we're going to start off with A. So, A has three different strokes and we'll start off with an horizontal line followed by a curved vertical line that strikes through it and we finish off with a short diagonal line and while holding the pen, you move it across the line in a semi-circle formation. Let's do it again. One, two, three. Okay, that is A. So, A is composed of three different segments. The horizontal line, the vertical line across it and the diagonal line with the semi-circle and together, they are written like this. One, two, three. Very simple. The next character we're going to draw is E and E is made out of two strokes. It has the curved vertical line followed by a short straight line at the end of it and the second stroke, a smaller curved line the opposite way. And now, you have E. Let's do it again. One, two. That's E. Alright, so the next character we're going to write is U and U is also composed out of two strokes. First, we start at the top with a short line followed by a, let's say, a half heart which goes like this and that, my friends, is U. Let's do it again. One, two. Now, the fourth character we're going to do is E and E starts the same way as U with a short line at the top like this followed by, instead of a half heart, we would make it a zigzag of two lines ending with a curve at the end and it goes like this. Let's do it again. So, we have one, two. Let's put these two together. So, if you write U and you write E next to it, you'll have the word Ue which means up. And finally, we're going to finish off with O. One, two, three. Okay, so that's O, pretty similar to a. Let's do it again. One, two, three. If I was to split this character into three different segments, it would look like this. One, two, three. Alright, let's write some words out of these characters. The word for blue is Au and this will be a perfect opportunity to showcase the two characters side by side. So, once again, we have the character for A. Next to it is O. And now we have the word Au for blue. Let's write another character. The word for love means Ai and it's written like this. Ai. Can you guess these characters? Yep, it's Ue and it means up. What about these characters? That's right, it means house. Congratulations, you have learned the first five characters which are the vowels for the Japanese. We're going to write them again in this one snippet. A, I, U, E, and O. Thank you very much for watching and remember that practice is the key to mastering any language script. Feel free to re-watch this video and continue writing down the characters. In case you found this video useful, be sure to give it a like and subscribe to my channel because I will be making more videos as we go on. Also, feel free to leave a comment as any feedback will be of great help. Bye for now.