I’ve been learning Hiragana and keep slipping up every so often with dakuten/handakuten. I’ve tried mnemonics but there aren’t any good ones. How do you guys remember what each character and its extension is?
Do a quick primer for phonetics to understand consonant voicing. Dakuten add voicing to the consonant in the original kana, which means that what your mouth and tongue are doing stays the same but your vocal chords vibrate. Hold your hand on your throat and alternate saying S and Z sounds, and you will feel it; adding dakuten to a kana starting with S turns it to Z. The other unvoiced-voiced consonant pairs in Japanese are K-G, T-D, and P-B.
The exceptions are covered by being aware of the Nihon-shiki romanization style, which is more regular and logical than the Hepburn style Renshuu uses, and some tidbits about historical Japanese phonetics. For example in Nihon-shiki, たちつてと is Ta Ti Tu Te To, all written the same consonant to represent their place on the kana chart, instead of ち and つ being Chi and Tsu to approximate their pronunciation. Therefore Ti and Tu (ち & つ) respectively change to Di and Du (ぢ & づ) with the T-D dakuten shift, but because those combinations of sounds don't exist in modern standard Japanese, ぢ and づ are pronounced Ji and Zu instead.
Handakuten exists because P used to be a very common sound in Japanese, but in modern Japanese most P sounds have become H instead. That's why H kana becomes B with dakuten, like は Ha to ば Ba, even though the unvoiced-voiced pair is technically P-B. In order to represent the P sounds that still survive in the language, like Pa ぱ, we use handakuten to change H kana back to P. No other kana take the handakuten in regular use, so you just have to remember that ゜ is always a P consonant.
I can't think of any mnemonics that would make sense of it. I just look at the pattern, because there is kind of a logic when you look at how they're voiced. I could make something up on the spot though.
The point is the vowels are constant no matter what. It's the paired consonant before the vowel that changes. Each consonant row has only one changed voicing (the handakuten is an extra that would count as one on its own). That voiced consonant is somewhat with respect to how the regular consonant is pronounced, if that makes sense. I really can't explain it in particular, but this is how it goes.
Starting from か行: K to G S to Z (but じ is typically "ji") T to D (ち is either dji or di, depending on circumstances) は行 has 2 voicings, one for dakuten (B) and one for handakuten (P).
So the K and G have that same hard sound.
S turns into Z, cuz dat's da bizness
T can be muddled to D. Kind of like when you try to say "bottle" or "water", depending on your accent, it may come off less like a hard T and more like a D.
The last one, coincidentally enough, shares a couple of the same voicings that the は行 characters used to be pronounced in Japanese long ago. In the modern Japanese perspective, I can't tell you if those voicings were deliberately chosen through all these reforms, or it was simply convenient at the time and stuck that way. Either way, they would, in fact, correspond as a relic of old Japanese if you want to look at it that way.
Knowing these voicings can be extremely useful, not because they can exist so you can use them to pronounce words, but they also show you what to choose when certain words will need a voice change and convert accordingly.
For example: 時々. The last symbol, 々 is an indicator of when you may need to repeat the pronunciation of a previous character. In this case, you can guess that the pronounciation of 時 is とき. The first character of that is と. The voiced version of the た行 that と belongs to, turns と into ど. Therefore, ときどき...(to)kie dokie!?!?
Same thing if you had a word like 人々. 人 is ひと, followed by 々 and would require a voice change. Again, all you need to do is look at the pronunciation of the first character. In this case, ひ. So, that really makes it easy. It has to be a B consonant. ひ (hi) turns into び (bi). Therefore 人々 would be the familiar ひとびと.
But then you're thinking, "....but why couldn't it be ぴ???"
Well, in this case, the P consonant appears under more specific conditions. This won't apply to words like 人々. If the first word ends in つ or ん, that will allow a P voicing. Also, if that word does end in a つ, the つ this time has to also turn into a small っ. You don't have to do anything to ん.
So why do these voicings exist and make words sound like that? It has to do with a thing called rendaku. It also applies to words made up of at least two kanji, so it becomes helpful to know where/when/how to read them. Also, it does make words easier to pronounce. Also, the thing is, rendaku doesn't exactly always work cleanly. The rules are more like general guidelines. There are times you don't rendaku. But knowing when it does apply, you'll have an easier time to convert. You'll learn and study that part later after you get the hang of pronunciations. It's a lot to explain here and that's just gonna be a totally different topic at that.
