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Home Calvin and Hobbes Kana Charts PHP Scripts About |
Here are charts for the Japanese character sets known as Hiragana and Katakana. Hiragana is used to represent Japanese words phonetically, while Katakana is used to represent non-Japanese words phonetically. For example, "konnichiwa" would be written in Hiragana, but "America" would be written in Katakana (and phoneticized to "a-me-ri-ka"). Not represented here is Kanji, the writing system traditionally used in Japan. It is mostly pictographic, and was adapted from the Chinese writing system. Children learn Hiragana, because it is phonetic and there are so few, but as they grow older, they learn more and more of the 30000+ Kanji. For both sets of kana, I have made a Unicode chart with the actual Japanese characters in the HTML and an image-based chart for non-Unicode-compliant browsers. The images in the image-based charts were yanked from kids-japan. Hiragana Katakana |