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I am learning Hiragana, and I pulled a couple of charts off the internet to use as study aids. One of them has the line of characters ぢゃ, ぢゅ, and ぢょ, but they are not in the other chart.

Are these characters a mistake? Are they still used? Are they deprecated?

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They are possible in rendaku, as a result of voicing ちゃ, ちゅ, ちょ:

  • いろ + ちゃや = いろぢゃや
  • ぼん + ちょうちん = ぼんぢょうちん

In other cases, though, じゃ, じゅ, じょ are normally used for ja/ju/jo.

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  • Thank you. So if I understand rendaku, a word will never begin with a voiced consonant. Does that mean when I see a hiragana character with handakuten applied, then it is likely not the first syllable of a word?
    – Rabet
    Commented Mar 3, 2022 at 0:03
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    @Rabet No, rendaku is just a process which happens in some compound words, it doesn't mean that there can't be any words in Japanese starting with a voiced consonant. You can even see that the word ぼんぢょうちん in my above answer starts with a voiced consonant.
    – kinai
    Commented Mar 3, 2022 at 2:01

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