Japanese alphabet

Hiragana chart

Hiragana is the first script Japanese children learn. It writes grammatical endings, particles and many everyday words, and it sits above kanji (as furigana) to show how they read. It has the same sounds as katakana: every character below links to its twin.

Basic characters (gojūon)

Voiced sounds (dakuten ゛ and handakuten ゜)

Combined sounds (yōon)

Extended sounds (rare in hiragana)

Read your first Japanese words in 10 minutes

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