Japanese Writing Systems

Japanese has three "alphabets" that are used for common writing. Two of them, Hiragana and Katakana, are similar to our Latin alphabet where each character represents a particular sound. The third writing system is Kanji, borrowed from the Chinese writing system. Normal Japanese writing, say from a newspaper, will often have all three, but mostly just Kanji and Hiragana. Katakana is used mostly for foreign loan words; words borrowed from other languages and incorporated into the Japanese vocabulary.

Here's a chart with with all the Hiragana characters and their English equivalents:

There are a few notable exceptions in this table. Note that there is no symbol associated with the yi or ye sounds, or the wi, wu, or we sounds. These sounds simply aren't used in the Japanese language. Also of note, the wo (を) sound is actually pronounced as "oh" instead of "woh." This is kind of a special character that's only used in particular places, which we'll cover later.

In addition to these "base" sounds, there are a couple of diacritics that are used to modify the consanant sounds of the K, S, T, and H columns. Those diacritics and resulting sounds are listed in this table:

You can see from the table above, that the diacritic changes the K sound to G, S to Z, T to D, and H to B or P, depending on the specific diacritic. One notable exception here is the じ character which is pronounced as jee and not zee.

If that's not enough, there are also a handful of "special" sounds written by adding a small や, ゆ, or よ after one of the above characters.