Japanese alphabet

Hiragana is a syllable alphabet (each symbol means not a sound, but a syllable) used in Japanese. It is part of the modern Japanese language. It includes 46 characters (and some obsolete ones). Hiragana is used primarily for recording endings, conjunctions, and postfixes. The roots of words are written in kanji (hieroglyphs). It is allowed to replace kanji with hiragana, but this is considered not very literate (mostly children do this when they learn to write). It is mainly used to record the pronunciation of Japanese words. In hiragana, each character (with the exception of vowels and one exception) does not denote a letter, but a syllable - that is, a combination of a consonant and vowel sounds. There are simply no symbols for consonants in hiragana. Each syllable has its own pronunciation, which never changes, regardless of the position of the syllable in the word or the syllables standing next to it, which is very convenient for memorization. True, there are compound sounds consisting of several syllables, but they are also always pronounced the same way. The entire set of sounds is based on "soft" consonants (t, k, s, x). Their "solid" counterparts are obtained by adding to the two dashes (nigori) in the upper right corner of the icon.
Hiragana characters are distinguished by their rounded, soft writing. (平 仮 名 hiragana from Japanese translates as “flat alphabet” - that is, not “angular”). Hiragana was used by female authors of diaries and novels in the 9th-12th centuries. She wrote Japanese poetry. Hiragana was originally a kind of "lightweight" letter, as it was believed that the characters for a woman are very difficult.