Lingofly් — hal kirima
«hal kirima» is a sign of the Sinhala script. No vowel at all: ක් — just “k”. The Sinhala alphabet has 59 letters in total, and this character can be played right here. This character does not count as a letter of the alphabet. The very sign that turns a syllable into a bare consonant. Almost every closed word ends with it: බත් (bat) is “bat”, not “bata”. On a carrier the character looks like this: ක්. It appears, for example, in the word “ආයුබෝවන්” (āyubōvan) — hello.
In short
| Character | ් |
| Name | hal kirima |
| Sound | hal (no vowel) |
| What it is | a sign |
| On the carrier | ක් |
In our course the character comes 74th of 76: the order here is not alphabetical but from familiar to unfamiliar, its neighbours in the course are ෞ and ං, appears in roughly every other word on this site.
How to type ්
- On a phone: add the Sinhala keyboard in the keyboard settings (Gboard on Android; Keyboards in the iPhone settings).
- In Word on Windows: type U+0DCA and press Alt+X right after it — the code turns into the character.
- On a Mac: switch to the Unicode Hex Input source, hold Option and type 0DCA.
- Type this sign after its base letter, even where it is drawn before it: letter first, then the sign, and they join.
- Unicode code point: U+0DCA. With it, the character can be found in the character map of any system.
How it sounds
No vowel at all: ක් — just “k”
The character in the “hal, bindu and visarga” group
Three signs that are not vowels. Hal kirima removes the vowel altogether, the bindu adds a nasal shade, the visarga has remained from Sanskrit.
Words with this character
How to remember this character
A single letter is the hardest thing to remember: memory has nothing to hold on to — a character has no meaning. A three-step loop works: see the character, try to recall the sound, see the right answer.
And come back to it the next day, not in an hour: a check a day or two later beats a check the same day. Nobody holds the whole alphabet — 59 letters — at once.
- It is better to test yourself the next day than at the end of the same session. That is why a word comes back to you tomorrow.checked many timesAdesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017, Review of Educational Research 87(3) · g = 0.82 when tested a day or two later, against 0.56 on the same day.
- Studying a little every day gets more into your head than spending the same total time in one sitting.checked many timesDonovan & Radosevich, 1999, Journal of Applied Psychology 84(5) · 63 studies compared, difference d = 0.46 — a sizeable figure for a learning effect.
Frequently asked
How does the Sinhala character ් read?
Hal (no vowel). It is a sign of the Sinhala script. No vowel at all: ක් — just “k”.
What is the sign ් called?
Hal kirima is what this character is called when the alphabet is recited aloud.