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Japanese Alphabet
Some information about the Japanese alphabet
Just like the English language, Japanese has its own alphabet. But unlike the English alphabet with 26 letters, the basic Japanese alphabet has 48 letters, each of them consisting one syllable. Below you can see a table of Japanese syllabary.
The five vowels in the Japanese language are  (a),  (i),  (u),  (e), and  (o). Most of the other letters are consonant + vowel sounds. Notice though, that (shi), (chi), (tsu) and (fu) have different consonant sounds than other letters in the same row. Also (wi) and (we) are letters from old Japanese and aren't used in modern Japanese, except for in people's names. Unlike the English alphabet which has 21 consonants, the Japanese alphabet has only one independent consonant, the  (n).
By adding a " " and " " above each letters a whole new set of syllabary called the "dakuon" and "han-dakuon" are formed.
There are also the small letters, " ", " ", " ". They are used with some of the letters to form new syllables, too.
Last but not least, there is the small letter " ". Is it used between two syllabes in Japanese.
Did you know?
The Japanese has two kinds of alphabet, Hiragana and Katakana. Hiragana is used when we have no Japanese characters (Kanji) for the words or we don't remember the right Kanji. Katakana is used mainly for foreign names. The Japanese alphabet consists of 99 sounds formed with 5 vowels (a, e, i, o, and u) and 14 consonants (k, s, t, h, m, y, r, w, g, z, d, b, p, and n).
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