My First Hiragana Activity Book

by Yuko Green

This entertaining and instructive activity book introduces English-speaking children to simple words in the Japanese language. Japanese youngsters just beginning to read and write also will find the easy-to-follow book helpful. Spaces are provided for drawing each hiragana symbol with one, two, or three strokes.
Forty-six characters make up the basic Japanese hiragana, or alphabet, with each symbol of the hiragana depicting a syllable rather than a single letter. With these 46 characters, you'll be able to write hundreds of words in Japanese — from ahiru (duck), ame (candy)‚ and atama (head) to yuki (snow), yuri (lily), and yubi (finger).
For each character, there is a selection of ready-to-color illustrations of items whose names begin with that character — more than 330 words in all — along with the word in Japanese characters. A separate list accompanies the Japanese word with a transliteration and an English translation. The book also lists 58 hiragana "modified syllables" used to form thousands of additional words.

48 pages, Paperback

First published October 27, 2000

Reviews

[Sushi (寿司) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was nice to start 2 years ago.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a cute coloring book for forcing the hiragana to stay in your head and for learning some basic and fun words in Japanese. Probably best for the younger ones, but as an adult I was entertained enough to get some good practice out of it.