Kana

Undergoing Reconstruction!

Read the tables from top to bottom, and from right to left. You can remember the proper order for the basic kana characters with the saying:

"Kana Signs, Take Note How Much You Read and Write them."

Just remember that vowels are first and stand-alone 'n' is last.

Hiragana

Hiragana is used along with kanji to write all native Japanese words (including words of Chinese origin). Hiragana is used for verb and adjective endings (okurigana), particles, words that have no kanji, words which are commonly written only in kana, words for which the writer does not know the kanji, and as furigana (hints provided by the writer to the reading of an unfamiliar kanji).

Basic Characters

* These syllables are not used in modern Japanese.

Voiced sounds

Glides

Notes

In hiragana, long "o" or "u" vowels are indicated by following an "o" or "u" syllable with う. There are occasions where a word contains a syllable that was originally written as "wo", where the lengthening is represented by hiragana "o" instead. There are relatively few of these, and so they may be learned on a case-by-case basis. One example is "ookii" which is written out in hiragana as おおきい　(although, usually you　use the kanji:大きい)

Long "i" or "e" vowels are indicated by following an "i" or "e" syllable with い. There has been some argument on the topic, but in general えい　is read as a doubled length of え　and does not have any glide to an "i" sound.

Long "a" is written by following a syllable with あ.

Katakana

Katakana is used for loan words from western languages, including foreign names. It is used for emphasis similar to the way that italics are used in English. It is also used to replace the many unfamiliar kanji of things like fish or produce at a market or restaurant.

Basic Characters

* These syllables are not used in modern Japanese.

Voiced sounds

Glides

Additional Combinations

In katakana a number of combinations are possible to represent sounds in foreign words that do not occur in Japanese. Most of these are very rare. Different Japanese input method editors will require different combinations of letters to represent these kana combinations, or may not provide any, requiring a user to enter each character of the combination separately.

Where the romanizations do not look pronounceable, it is possible that they represent an input scheme for the combination rather than the actual sound.

Notes

All long vowels in katakana are indicated by the vowel elongation mark (see below), rather than by additional characters as in hiragana.

Word boundaries may be indicated by the word separation mark (see below).

Additional Symbols and Punctuation

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