My First Hiragana Activity Book (Dover Bilingual Books For Kids)

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.