Help mastering the correct pronunciation for Dakuten on Hiragana?

Hi JRef forum!
I'm so happy to have found this community, it looks fantastic.

I've been speaking Japanese for about 2 years now but only this year I started with writing. For the past 2 weeks I have been working on an intensive course to read and write in hiragana - which I have now completed apart from this minor setback. I've been using the book 'Remembering the Kana'.

I have been progressing well up until I found Dakuten, I understand handakuten and have no problem with them as they are much easier to remember but for some reason I can only do a set of 5 hiragana with dakuten flashcards at a time - when I put all 20 together I seem to forget them or make silly mistakes.

I am baffled that the book I was working in was very well structured and clear about ways to learn each hiragana then there is literally a tiny paragraph for information on the dakuten - so I'm assuming it's easier than I'm finding it to be at the moment!

Is their an easy way to remember (a way that helped you yourself?) or should I just take it in baby steps mastering each one as an individual flash card?


Domo arigato gozaimasu

I'm confused. What is the exact problem you're having? Dakuten mark a sound as voiced rather than voiceless. So the sounds are formed exactly the same way except they are the voiced versions.

Example: か is ka, が is ga. Both of these sounds are produced with the tongue in the same location in the mouth, the only difference is that the "G" sound is voiced (meaning that your vocal chords vibrate when making the sound).

So it's all about remembering the sound of the character without dakuten and then just voicing that sound (okay, the "H"s are a bit different as the "H", and "B" sounds aren't articulated in exactly the same way ["B" is a voiced bilabial sound whereas "H" is a voiceless glottal fricative.]).

So...k becomes g, s becomes z, t becomes d. The only exceptions are that both じ and ぢ are pronounced ji, and both ず and づ are pronounced zu.

Hi Angel Valis, I'm happy to say I can now read and write them all after a good practice session this evening.

My problem was with some of the exceptions such as fu becoming bu - it was hard to think of them by the general rules that where found in the text book that you have also listed above - for some reason I just kept forgetting them when they were all mixed in a flashcard deck. I found a way to remember them easier I thought of the words 'KeG' - So K becomes G, 'ToDay' - for T becoming D, 'HBo' for H becoming B (I'm watching a lot of Game of Thrones by HBO ) and I could easily remember S for Z by itself. These three little keywords really helped as I knew the others.

An odd way to remember but it has made a huge different with my flash card tests! Thinking of linking words can really help I guess.