Japanese Language Letters

Japanese has two alphabets called hiragana curvy like english cursive and katakana angular like english print.

Japanese language letters. The two together are called kana. It s used to beg someone for all the deets. The japanese alphabet consists of two phonetic alphabets. This is supposed to be a single syllable.

Japanese almost always alternates between a consonant and a vowel. Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries. Hiragana is the primary form of written japanese. These characters each represent a sound and in that sense they are the letters that spell out japanese words.

A macron or circumflex may be used to indicate doubled vowels eg. You can t put a sentence together without it. Japanese has two phonetic alphabets which were invented to better fit the japanese language instead of depending on the chinese characters kanji alone. Small ゃ ゅ and ょ follows after letters in the second column and are used to transcribe contracted sounds.

No o wa de ni. Thus any japanese word can be written in a way that can be read without having to remember how the word is pronounced. The modern japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji which are adopted chinese characters and syllabic kana. Hiragana used primarily for native or naturalised japanese words and grammatical elements.

Instead it represents whole words. Almost all written japanese sentences contain a mixture of kanji and kana. Katakana and hiragana there s also kanji which are chinese characters. And katakana used primarily for foreign words and names loanwords onomatopoeia scientific names and sometimes for emphasis.

The third writing system kanji is not really an alphabet or a syllabary. Because of this mixture. Japanese r sounds are between english l and r sounds. It s vital to learn these special characters if you want to learn japanese.

While the hiragana consists of 48 syllables it is a phonetic alphabet where each alphabetic combination represents just a single sound. Like korean the japanese alphabet is silabic with the exception of the n. Exceptions are digraphs shi and chi fricative tsu gemination two of the same consonant in a row and palatalization a consonant followed by the letter y. The japanese alphabet is usually referred to as kana specifically hiragana and katakana.

Another common shorthand it means i need the details or details please it comes from the japanese phrase 詳しく kuwashiku so it s the first letter of each syllable when romanized. Hiragana ひらがな and katakana カタカナ.