Japanese Language Alphabets
Together these three writing methods make up the entirety of the japanese language.
Japanese language alphabets. There are 48 katakana symbols that have similar sounds to hiragana. Japanese has two phonetic alphabets which were invented to better fit the japanese language instead of depending on the chinese characters kanji alone. In modern japanese the hiragana and katakana syllabaries each contain 46 basic characters or 71 including diacritics.
It s vital to learn these special characters if you want to learn japanese. In japanese the alphabet is broken into three separate trees. Hiragana katakana and kanji. This is supposed to be a single syllable.
There are 46 hiragana and katakana characters each and both are used to represent the same sounds. Japanese alphabet katakana is also a syllabic alphabet. Katakana and hiragana there s also kanji which are chinese characters. Like korean the japanese alphabet is silabic with the exception of the n.
Each character of the phonetic alphabet represents a syllable or sound cluster. Japanese r sounds are between english l and r sounds. With one or two minor exceptions each different sound in the japanese language that is each different syllable strictly each mora corresponds to one character in each syllabary. But how can you tell the difference between them.
Unlike kanji these characters intrinsically represent sounds only. It is no coincidence that there is the same number of characters in both the hiragana and katakana alphabets as they both represent exactly the same sounds some of them even look quite similar. The japanese alphabet consists of two phonetic alphabets.
