Hiragana & Katakana

Japanese is written in a combination of three scripts: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Kanji represents ideas or objects, hiragana expresses the grammatical relationships between them. Katakana is used for words of foreign origin. Like romaji, both hiragana and katakana characters represent one syllable and have no meaning other than the representation of sound. Though Japanese is usually written in a combination of three scripts, Japanese sentences can be written in either hiragana or katakana only. I think learning hiragana and katakana is a good start for Japanese writing.

I will show 46 basic hiragana characters this time, and in the following lessons I will introduce how to write them.(by Namiko Abe)

HIRAGANA

Before we start, I want to remind you about Japanese writing. Japanese is a written combination of three scripts, hiragana, katakana and kanji. The Roman alphabet (Romaji) is also sometimes used, mainly for the convenience of foreigners. Roughly speaking, kanji represents blocks of meaning and hiragana expresses the grammatical relationship between them. Katakana is used for foreign names, place names, and words of foreign origin.(by Namiko Abe)

KATAKANA