Japanese Alphabet

The Japanese Alphabet

This page contains a table including the following: Japanese alphabet, including Kana, Hiragana, and Katakana, and letters which help you pronounce Japanese words. You will also learn about the different consonants and vowels in the Japanese language.

Make sure to also check out our Learn Japanese page, which contains several lessons that might help you on your language learning journey.

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:

Maybe you have noticed that many sounds are missing. That's why the Japanese added some additional sounds using diacritics or combinations of syllables.

The table below shows the additional sounds in 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 in 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.

I hope the content of this page was useful to you, and that you learned some useful information about the Japanese alphabet, including the Kana, Hiragana, and Katakana, consonants and vowels.