Hir@gana Times

About ten years ago or so, I used to buy a monthly magazine called “Hir@gana Times“.

It’s a monthly magazine that used to cost ¥390 (about US$4) when I bought it.
I bought it to study Japanese. That’s the main purpose of the magazine. All of the articles are written in English and Japanese. The Japanese kanji characters everywhere in the articles have the ふりがな reading over them to assist people learning to read Japanese (my blog, BTW, also has ふりがな for all of the kanji. Hold your mouse over the kanji on this blog and it’ll pop up.)

I quit buying the magazine years ago but I thought about it today for some reason.
I decided to see if the magazine has a website…and of course it does.

It’s seems that the price of the magazine has gone up to ¥450 per issue…and most of their website is only available to paying members!
But it does have some free sections…and just like their print magazine, all of the kanji on the website has ふりがな. But their website does the ふりがな differently than I do on my blog…they have the ふりがな characters printed above the kanji just like in their magazine (and Japanese children’s books). I put the ふりがな on my blog as small pop-ups because I think that’s a better way to remember the kanji.

Anyways, if you want to see their website, it’s here.

And here’s an article from their site:

(Click to enlarge)

(Click to enlarge)