Pop Japan

A short intro to Hiragana

What is Hiragana? Hiragana is one of the three Japanese characters or phonetic alphabet that symbolizes sounds in Japanese. It's used to write Japanese along with Katakana (foreign words) and Kanji (Chinese characters.

When it's used?

Hiragana is used to write helping verbs, symbolism, some Chinese words, adjective endings, particles
and words with no kanji. There are 46 Hiragana characters and each represents different sounds.
You can write all Japanese texts in Hiragana but it can be too hard to read because there's no space.
Instead, kanji are used to replace some words. On the other hand, you can't also write Japanese entirely in Kanji and instead, you have to write it along with the combo of Katakana and Hiragana.

 The following are examples of hiragana. The left side is the hiragana and the right side is romaji (Japanese words in Roman/Latin alphabet)

 こんばんは                     Konban wa
 ただいま                        Tadaima
 おはようございます       Ohayou gozaimasu

Tags: japanese, japanese script, writing system, alphabet, hiragana, language