Hiragana Katakana Romaji Converter for Japanese

Hiragana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana, kanji and in some cases rōmaji . It is a phonetic lettering system. The word hiragana literally means "ordinary" or "simple" kana ("simple" originally as contrasted with kanji).

Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems. With one or two minor exceptions, each syllable in the Japanese language (strictly, each mora) is represented by one character (or one digraph) in each system. This may be either a vowel such as "a" (hiragana あ); a consonant followed by a vowel such as "ka" (か) or "n" (ん), a nasal sonorant which, depending on the context, sounds either like English m, n or ng ([ŋ]) when syllable-final or like the nasal vowels of French, Portuguese or Galician. Because the characters of the kana do not represent single consonants (except in the case of ん "n"), the kana are referred to as syllabic symbols and not alphabetic letters.

Hiragana is used to write okurigana (kana suffixes following a kanji root, for example to inflect verbs and adjectives), various grammatical and function words including particles, as well as miscellaneous other native words for which there are no kanji or whose kanji form is obscure or too formal for the writing purpose. Words that do have common kanji renditions may also sometimes be written instead in hiragana, according to an individual author's preference, for example to impart an informal feel. Hiragana is also used to write furigana, a reading aid that shows the pronunciation of kanji characters.

There are two main systems of ordering hiragana: the old-fashioned iroha ordering and the more prevalent gojūon ordering.