Japanese Dakuten, Handakuten and Contracted Sounds

But now that the article is there, let me make a few comments about dakuten, handakuten, and hiragana in general.

I grew up in the U.S., but I have been living in Japan, and mostly in Japanese, for nearly forty years. Thirty years ago, I watched my two daughters acquire Japanese as their first language, and now I am enjoying watching my two-year-old grandson grow up with the language as well. (He is also picking up some English from me.)

What has struck me both times is how beneficial hiragana is to the acquisition of first-language literacy. Because there is nearly a one-to-one correspondence between symbol and pronunciation, many children learn to recognize hiragana words that they know very early—before age three, in the case of both my daughters and my grandson.

I suspect that is much less common with English, because of the poor correspondence between symbols and phonemes.

The full written Japanese language, especially kanji, is much more complex and irregular, of course. But that head-start in reading hiragana may help many children get interested in reading at an earlier age than with English.

In the last week or so, my daughter and I have noticed that my grandson has started to read dakuten characters correctly. He now (usually) recognizes that since た is ta then だ is da and that since き is ki then ぎ is gi, that is, the cases in which the ゛(dakuten) indicates that the initial consonant becomes voiced. He doesn’t yet understand, though, how はひふへほ ha hi hu (fu) he ho becomes ばびぶべぼ ba bi bu be bo and ぱぴぷぺぽ pa pi pu pe po, because the difference between h and b/p is not just a simple voiceless-to-voiced change.

According to a Japanese book on children’s language acquisition [1], many children learning Japanese as a first language have the same problem with the は series hiragana.

[1] https://www.iwanami.co.jp/book/b281696.html