Japanese language, or Nihongo, uses up to four separate writing systems: 

1) Romāji – The transliteration of Japanese using western letters.  Due to the nature of the Japanese language, this transliteration presents many challenges.  As a consequence, a Japanese word can have several spellings using the roman alphabet, because there are several conventions or systems that can be used for Romāji. 

2) Hiragana – The primary phonetic system used in Japanese.  It is based on syllables, rather than letters.  Hiragana is the first writing system learned by native Japanese speakers.

3) Katakana – This is the alternate phonetic system used in Japanese to write all foreign words such as names.  It is also based on syllables, rather than letters. 

4) Kanji – Japanese language has approximately 5,000 Chinese symbols or Kanji, out of which 2,000 are commonly used, and close to 1,000 are learned in grade school.  These Chinese symbols have different pronunciations in all Asian languages.  In Japanese there are multiple pronunciations for each Kanji.   more

Japanese Phonetic Charts – The following charts present all the Japanese phonetics sounds, represented in Romaji, Hiragana & Katakana.  Read from top to bottom and from right to left:

Basic     Modified     Modified: ya yu yo     Long Vowels/Double Consonants

Basic     Modified     Modified: ya yu yo     Long Vowels/Double Consonants     Back To Top

Basic     Modified     Modified: ya yu yo     Long Vowels/Double Consonants     Back To Top

Basic     Modified     Modified: ya yu yo     Long Vowels/Double Consonants     Back To Top

Basic     Modified     Modified: ya yu yo     Long Vowels/Double Consonants     Back To Top