Japanese Alphabet — Complete Hiragana & Katakana Charts

How Japanese Kana Sounds Work

Japanese has just five pure vowels — a, i, u, e, o — pronounced as in Spanish or Italian: ah, ee, oo, eh, oh. They never change quality, and every kana ends in one of them (except ん). What does change meaning is length: a long vowel is simply held twice as long, and おばさん obasan (aunt) versus おばあさん obāsan (grandmother) hang on that difference alone. Hiragana writes length with an extra vowel kana; katakana uses the bar ー.

The two small marks multiply the 46 base kana without adding new shapes to learn. The dakuten ゛ voices a consonant row — k becomes g, s becomes z, t becomes d, h becomes b — so か ka reads が ga; the handakuten ゜ applies only to the h-row, giving p (ぱ pa). Combined with the small ゃ ゅ ょ glides (きゃ kya, しゅ shu, ちょ cho) and the small っ that doubles the next consonant (きって kitte, stamp), those 46 signs cover every syllable in the language.

Kana is only part of the writing system. Real Japanese text weaves three scripts together in a single sentence: kanji (characters borrowed from Chinese) carry word roots, hiragana carries grammar — verb endings, particles, native words — and katakana carries loanwords, foreign names, and emphasis. That is why learners start with hiragana: it is the connective tissue of every sentence, and it doubles as the pronunciation guide (furigana) printed above unfamiliar kanji.

Letters That Trip Up English Speakers

History of the Japanese (Kana) Alphabet

Japan had no native writing until Chinese characters arrived around the 5th century AD. Since kanji were built for a completely different language, scribes began using certain characters purely for their sound — a system called man'yōgana, named after the 8th-century poetry anthology Man'yōshū that showcased it. Both kana syllabaries were born from those phonetic kanji, by two different routes.

Hiragana emerged in the Heian era (9th century) as whole man'yōgana characters written in flowing cursive — 安 became あ, 加 became か. It became the vehicle of court literature, so associated with aristocratic women's writing (onnade, "the women's hand") that masterpieces like The Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book were composed in it. Katakana arose in the same period from the opposite impulse: Buddhist monks annotating Chinese texts needed speed, so they wrote just a fragment of each character — 加 shrank to カ.

For a thousand years, multiple kana variants could write the same syllable. The script reform of 1900 fixed one shape per sound (relegating the rest to decorative hentaigana), and the 1946 orthography reform retired ゐ/ヰ (wi) and ゑ/ヱ (we), whose sounds had merged into i and e centuries earlier. That produced today's tidy 46-kana sets — with を kept, by convention, purely for the object particle.

Frequently Asked Questions