What do we say ABCD in Japanese?

The reason some people find Japanese reading and writing difficult is because we use THREE sets of characters: hiragana, katakana and kanji.

Resources for further reading:

Hiragana ひらがな and Katakana カタカナ

Japanese has two phonetic alphabets known as hiragana and katakana. These were invented to better fit the Japanese language, instead of depending on the Chinese characters (kanji), alone. Each character of the phonetic alphabet represents a syllable (a unit of sound).

The hiragana and katakana alphabets both have 46 basic characters and share the same sounds. Hiragana is used in nearly every Japanese sentence, in conjunction with kanji. Katakana, on the other hand, is mainly reserved for foreign names and loan words.

Since these two alphabets are phonetic, anything you can say in Japanese, you can write down using these characters.

While you're still familiarizing yourself with hiragana and katakana, it might help to take a look at the rōmaji. Rōmaji is the romanization of Japanese words using Latin script - that is, the same letters that we use in English. Rōmaji is read the same way as you would read a text in English; of course, you'll be needing the Japanese pronunciation though!

Hiragana Syllables

In Japanese dictionaries, entries are placed in alphabetical order - just like in English. However, the alphabetical order in Japanese is quite different.

The 46 hiragana characters are shown in the table below in "alphabetical" or "dictionary order." In this table, the characters are read from left to right, beginning from the top row.

So we read あ (a), い (i), う (u), え (e), お (o), then か (ka), き (ki), く (ku), け (ke), こ (ko), and so on.

Japanese pronunciation is easy! The most important pronunciations are those of the five vowels: あ (a), い (i), う (u), え (e), and お (o). Nearly every other syllable consists of a consonant and one of these vowels, so as long as you can distinguish these five clearly, youll be alright! Let's give them a try: