{"id":176592750,"date":"2020-01-08T11:19:46","date_gmt":"2020-01-08T19:19:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lingq.com\/blog-new\/?p=176592750"},"modified":"2025-05-19T11:26:07","modified_gmt":"2025-05-19T18:26:07","slug":"japanese-alphabet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lingq.com\/blog\/japanese-alphabet\/","title":{"rendered":"The Japanese Alphabet: A Beginner’s Guide"},"content":{"rendered":"

Learning the Japanese alphabet as a complete beginner can be a bit intimidating. Not only is it a whole new language, there are three different alphabets! While this may seem challenging at first, the good thing is that, when you take it in steps, it becomes much easier to master. The first of these steps right off the bat should be mastering hiragana, and this post will show you how.<\/p>\n

Learning the Japanese Alphabet: Step 1 –\u00a0 Hiragana<\/b><\/h2>\n

Hiragana is the most basic of the three alphabets, and the foundation of the written Japanese language. It\u2019s the first one children in Japan learn, just like we learn our ABCs. There are 46 characters, each representing a certain sound, and they are pretty simple in shape. If a little kid can pick it up, then so can you! Let\u2019s learn a little more about how this alphabet works.<\/span><\/p>\n

Though we call it an alphabet, if you want to get technical, hiragana is actually a phonetic syllabary. That means that unlike a conventional alphabet, in which each letter represents a specific individual sound in the form of consonants and vowels (a, b, c, etc.), a phonetic syllabary such as hiragana uses symbols which represents a whole syllable.<\/span><\/p>\n

For example, in the English alphabet, the syllable \u201cka\u201d is made up of two separate letters, k and a. In Japanese, however, the symbol \u304b is read as the syllable \u201cka,\u201d but cannot be broken down further (there is no separate letter for \u2018k\u2019 and \u2018a.\u2019) <\/span>
\nBelow you can see how the LingQ reader makes hiragana easy to read.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Learn<\/h2>\n

How Hiragana is Used<\/b><\/h2>\n

As the foundation of the Japanese written language, there are several important instances in which hiragana plays an important role:<\/span><\/p>\n

Furigana<\/b>
\nFurigana is basically a pronunciation guide to difficult Japanese words, written as small Hiragana characters above or beside kanji characters. Kanji are the complex Chinese characters that represent full words and are most commonly used in texts. If you can\u2019t read kanji, there will most likely be Furigana right there to help.<\/span>
\nYou can see Furigana in lessons in the LingQ Japanese library too.
\n\"\"
\nParticles (and Sentence Breaks)<\/b>
\nParticles are an important part of Japanese grammar. They are added at the end of a word and indicate whether it is a subject, object, or verb of a sentence. The most commonly seen are \u306f (wa), \u304c (ga), and \u3092 (wo). This is also important to understand the flow of written sentences since words are not separated by spaces. Particle placements and grammatical hiragana (below) are good indicators of where a word ends.<\/span>
\nPolyglot Steve Kaufmann made a great video on Japanese particles for his YouTube channel.<\/p>\n