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| The Japanese alphabet is usually referred to as kana, specifically hiragana and katakana. The Hiragana consists of 48 syllables, it is a phonetic alphabet where each alphabetic combination represents just a single sound. Thus any Japanese word can be written in a way that can be read without having to remember how the word is pronounced. So the Japanese kana are much simpler, the way something is written is the way it sounds. There is also Kanji, a Japanese system of writing based on borrowed or slightly modified Chinese characters. |
The Japanese alphabet is usually referred to as kana, specifically hiragana and katakana. While the Hiragana consists of 48 syllables, it is a phonetic alphabet where each alphabetic combination represents just a single sound. Thus any Japanese word can be written in a way that can be read without having to remember how the word is pronounced. So the Japanese kana are much simpler, the way something is written is the way it sounds. There is also Kanji, a Japanese system of writing based on borrowed or slightly modified Chinese characters.
Hiragana Syllables (Alphabet)
The table below shows the 48 Hiragana syllables:
Hiragana :
Katakana Syllables (Alphabet)
Katakana are most often used for transcription of words in foreign languages. used to represent sounds, technical and scientific terms.
Katakana's main feature is short straight strokes and angular corners, that’s why Katakana is considered the simplest of the Japanese scripts.
For a modern Katakana there was a necessity to add some sounds, below is a list of additions to the katakana, used mainly to represent sounds from other languages:
Kanji Characters (Alphabet)
Kanji are used together with three other systems to write modern Japanese, Kanji which is a Japanese system of writing based on borrowed or slightly modified Chinese characters is used to write parts of the language such as nouns, adjective stems and verb stems. For Kanji characters refers to the Chinese characters.
I hope this content was useful to you, and that you learned some Japanese alphabet, including the Kana, Hiragana, and Katakana, consonants and vowels. Try to memorize them to be able to use them in your daily conversation. If you feel comfortable with the Japanese characters then you might want to check our Japanese Keyboard page, which contains the characters you saw in the tables above and might help you in your learning process. Also visit Learn Japanese to learn more.
THATS ALL!
YURI MOTO
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