1. Hiragana (phonetic sounds) are basically used for particles, words and parts of words.2. Katakana (phonetic sounds) are basically used for foreign/loan words.3. Kanji (Chinese characters) are used for the stem of words and convey the meaning as well as sound.
About Hiragana
Hiragana is one of used in the Japanese language.
Each Hiragana letter represents particular syllable. Letter itself has no meaning.
Hiragana is used widely to form a sentence.
Hiragana was developed in the 8-10th century by simplifying the form of particular Kanji symbols.
Compared to Katakana, Hiragana letters have more curved lines.
Hiragana あ か た ま や
In modern Japanese, there are 46 basic Hiragana letters.
In addition to these 46 basic letters called gojūon , there are modified forms to describe more sounds - 20 dakuon , 5 handakuon , yōon 36 , 1 Sokuon and 6 additional letters .
Gojūon
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Gojūon-zu 【五十音図】
In Japanese, syllables are organized in the form of a table (5 x 10). This table is called gojūon-zu (literally means table of 50 sounds).
To describe these sounds, Hiragana and Katakana alphabets are used.
Letters い, う and え appear more than once in the table. These 5 duplicates (gray colored) are usually skipped or ignored.
Another syllable ん is included. It doesn't belong to any row or column.
In total, 46 letters (45+1) are counted as gojūon (50 sounds).
Structure of the Table
The first row - あ [a], い [i], う [u], え [e] and お [o] are five vowels of the Japanese language.
Letters in the same column contain the same vowel.
Letters in the same row are considered to contain the same consonant.
Letters お and を represent the same sound [o]. を is used only as the particle in a sentence.
