ん (n) – Hiragana

Pronunciation

– Pronounced as the Japanese ‘n’, similar to the English ‘n’ as in ‘new’.

About

ん, in hiragana, or ン in katakana, is one of the Japanese kana, which each represent one mora. It is the only kana sound ending with a consonant.

This kana is unique in several aspects; it can never begin a standard Japanese word (but it can however begin a foreign loan word). In some dialects of Japanese, ん may begin a contraction of a phrase, but such uses are generally for informal conversation only.

The kana is followed by an apostrophe in some systems of transliteration whenever it precedes a vowel or a y- kana, so as to prevent confusion with other kana. But like every other kana, it represents an entire mora – and so its pronunciation is, in practice, as close to ‘nn’ as ‘n’.

Mnemonics

Mnemonic 1: This is an easy kana to remember, it is quite simply a variation of the English letter ‘n’.