Read and Write Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji at JapaneseMEOW!
To see how to write each of the hiragana go here. These are the characters used to form Japanese words. Hiragana is kind of like the Japanese alphabet. Unlike the English alphabet, however, every Japanese character has the exact same sound as it's name and most characters are made of a consonant sound followed by a vowel.
Hiragana table. Even though one can theoretically write the whole language in hiragana, it is usually used only for grammatical endings of verbs, nouns, and adjectives, as well as for particles, and several other original Japanese words (in contrast to loan words that are written in katakana) which are not written in kanji. Hiragana is the first of all the writing systems taught to Japanese.
Write Japanese Hiragana Part 2. In this section you will get to learn to write Japanese hiragana of the remaining 21 characters. Click here to see how to write the first 25 hiragana characters. Similarly, in the subsequent diagrams that you are going to see, the first character on the left in each row shows the full hiragana character.
Now that you understand how hiragana “technically” works (i.e. you can see a simple word in romaji, then find the right kana to write down that word in hiragana), let’s start reading and writing. Before you start, though, I have to be clear on something really quick. Learning to read and write hiragana isn’t easy.
The modern Japanese writing system uses a mix of “syllabaries”: the phonetic character sets are called Hiragana and Katakana, and the ideograms, Chinese in origin, are called Kanji. In normal Japanese writing, Kanji and Hiragana are used, while Katakana is used for words borrowed from the (non-Chinese) foreign languages.
Katakana and hiragana are both syllabaries. In English we use the letters of the alphabet. In most words each letter stands for a bit of sound (a phoneme). In a syllabary each symbol stands for a syllable.
Hiragana characters are mostly used to write grammatical words, like particles, conjunctions, Japanese native words that have no kanji, and for words that have kanji but are more often written without it. When kanji is not expected to be known or is too formal, small hiragana is placed along the top or the side of the kanji to indicate its pronunciation.