First opened Thursday, January 27, 2011
初めて
はじめて
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
How to read it: a line over a kana means the voice is high there, and ↓ marks where it drops. A kana with no line is low. With no ↓ the pitch stays high to the end and does not drop even on a following particle (が, は).
for the first time
Hajimete is from 始めて (hajimete), the conjunctive form of the verb 始める (hajimeru, “to begin, to start”).
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
Written with 初
In a sentence
日本は初めてですか。
Is this your first visit to Japan?
初めての診察ですか。
Is this your first visit here?
Sentences are from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), picked by fixed rules from a dated export and shown unchanged. Nobody has reviewed them one by one.
What Wiktionary says
Quoted line by line from Wiktionary's Etymology section for this reading, taken from one dated dump so it can't change underneath us. Nothing below is paraphrased.
- “From 始(はじ)めて (hajimete), the conjunctive form of the verb 始(はじ)める (hajimeru, “to begin, to start”).”
Source: Wiktionary: 初めて (dump of 2026-09-02), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Reading, meaning and part of speech from JMdict, and kanji readings from KANJIDIC2 (EDRDG).
Other readings of 初めて on the same Wiktionary page
These describe other words written the same way, not はじめて. They are quoted for context: the parts, layer and processes of this word are not taken from them.
はずめて
- “Shift from 初(はじ)めて (hajimete) above.”
そめて
- “See the etymology of the corresponding lemma form.”
What the labels mean
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.