the Japanese Syllabary

Japanese language has 3 types of characters, hiragana, katakana and kanji.
For conversation , we need not to learn characters.
But to learn on the web , you'd bette know how to pronounce the characters.

On this weblog, Romaji are used inspite of Japanese characters.

Japanese children learn "hiragana" first.
"Hiragana" consists of 5 vowels and many syllables.
Each synable consists of 1 voiced consonant and 1 vowel.

In English , if you find "a" in a word, sometimes it is pronounced " ei ", sometimes "a".
But in Japanese " a " is "a". Pronounciation never change.

take : bamboo.( not "teik"but "ta-ke")
asoko : there . (not " eisoko" but " a-soko")


For example,
"a" is always "a" not depending on the word nor spell.
"ta" is always pronounced "ta".

the Japanese syllabary

5 vowels: a , i , u, e, o

Other syllables :
ka, ki, ku, ke,ko
sa, si, su,se, so
ta, chi, tsu, te,to
na, ni, nu, ne, no
ha, hi, fu,he, ho
ma, mi, mu, me, mo
ya, yu, yo
ra, ri, ru, re, ro,
wa, n

ga, gi, gu, ge, go
za, ji, zu, ze, zo
da,di, du, de, do
ba, bi, bu, be, bo
pa, pi, pu, pe, po

gya, gyu, gyo
ja, ju, jo
cha, chu, cho
nya, nyu, nyo
hya, hyu, hyo

Pronounciation of Japanese is not so difficult . The number of consonants and vowels are not so many compared to English.