Hiragana Vocab List...

[sivvyx01]

Hey,

I am looking for a basic list of hiragana vocab online - having issues finding any. Anyone know of any such sites???

[becki_kanou]

What exactly are you looking for? I googled "basic Japanese vocabulary list" and found lots of lists of different topics: animals, school, adjectives etc. Is there something specific you had in mind?

[sivvyx01]

I would prefer a list of the most commonly used hiragana words if possible.

[furrykef]

She said be more specific, not rephrase the original post.

By "hiragana words" do you mean words that are never written in kanji...? Why do you want such a list?

If you just want the most common words (whether or not they're usually written in kanji), then there are a gajabazillion word lists on the net. Whether they're in hiragana or not shouldn't make any difference, since if they're in romaji you can just make your own copy in hiragana anyway.

[Hyperworm]

To clear up a possible misconception...

Hiragana is the easiest Japanese character set (along with katakana) to learn, and the one first learned by children, but that does not mean that there exist a bunch of easy / child-level vocabulary words that are "hiragana words" and only get written in hiragana. Even words like "big" and "dog" are kanji words.

Instead, the custom for children is to annotate the kanji with hiragana indicating their reading (this is called "furigana"), or in books for very young children, to write all words in hiragana/katakana, even though that would not be acceptable in normal Japanese text.

There do exist words that are only written in hiragana, but these are largely words with a grammatical function (and so you should learn them properly from a grammar book/site or textbook, rather than from a list), or words that have such difficult/unusual kanji that hiragana are normally used instead (煩い / 五月蠅い) -- it's not that the easier words are written in hiragana.

You can't hope to build a useful small vocabulary from words that are hiragana-only. So this concept of "hiragana-only words for beginners" doesn't really exist, which is why you're not getting straight answers and your searches might not be going well.

If you'd like an easy hiragana vocabulary list, the best way -- as furrykef and becki_kanou have said already -- is going to be to search for beginner/basic vocab instead, and look for a list which has the hiragana for all the words (shouldn't be difficult to find; beginner sites should naturally list them in either romaji or hiragana since their readership doesn't know kanji).

That will cover you for hearing those words in speech and reading them in furigana text, but you still won't be able to write those 'easy' words as a Japanese speaker would, or read/understand them in general text, until you learn their kanji. There's no getting around it ^^

[sivvyx01]

Thank you very much for your reply - that was a clear explanation.
I am a beginner Japanese learner and am still getting my head around it all.

[katafei]

how about this site:
http://coscom.co.jp/

[Snowflake]

Sivvy, there is a site called Many Things by Charles Kelly. He has a huge variety of quizzes and exercises. Among them is a multiple choice quiz called "Words using only Hiragana from Newspapers". I'm linking you directly to that specific quiz; If you want more info or additional quizzes, you can go to the site's homepage from there.

In the specific quiz i linked, you can choose between a 4-choice and a 5-choice option. You'll see the word written in hiragana and then you choose the appropriate definition. There are over 3,000 words (broken up into 50-word chunks). There is also a katakana quiz that does the same thing.

Whether these words are "always" or "typically" written in kana, I don't know. But if full-word kana recognition practice is what you're looking for, these quizzes may be of help.

Edit: Oh Coscom, linked by Nilecat (hi, Nilecat!) is wonderful!!! One of my favorites. On most of their pages, you can switch up between romaji, kana and kanji and it has audio!

[phreadom]

Edit: Oh Coscom, linked by Nilecat (hi, Nilecat!) is wonderful!!! One of my favorites. On most of their pages, you can switch up between romaji, kana and kanji and it has audio!

I think you mean katafei? (Dutch woman vs Japanese man) 笑

I think the common 猫 theme in their names tricked you.

[Snowflake]

Edit: Oh Coscom, linked by Nilecat (hi, Nilecat!) is wonderful!!! One of my favorites. On most of their pages, you can switch up between romaji, kana and kanji and it has audio!

I think you mean katafei? (Dutch woman vs Japanese man) 笑

I think the common 猫 theme in their names tricked you.

Whoops! Indeed I did mean katafei!!! Apologies -- and (hi, katafei!!!)

[NikonGirl]

I recently found a program called Anki which is a flashcard program. You can download all kinds of flashcards from basic vocabulary, sentences, and kanji. They even have flashcards for Genki lessons as well as other textbooks. One of the sets I downloaded has over 22,000 vocabulary words. I started with 20 words and add 2 new ones to my list everyday. You can also set how often you want to review each card. If its hard, you review it daily, or if its easy you can review again in a week.
I also downloaded all the vocab for genki 1 and 2 so I can do drills and downloaded a set with 6000 sentences!
Another bonus is that you can make your own flashcards for anything you want to learn.