Japanese manual syllabary

Imagine you want to learn how to write and read Japanese, but you don't know the language yet. Luckily, Japanese people have a very clever way of writing their language that can help you do just that. They use something called a "syllabary," which is a set of symbols that represent different sounds.

But here's the cool part: unlike most languages that use an alphabet with letters that represent individual sounds, Japanese uses characters that represent entire syllables. These syllables are formed by combining a consonant sound with a vowel sound.

For example, let's say you want to write the word "Japan" in Japanese. In English, this word would be spelled with four letters - J, A, P, and N. But in Japanese, it would be written with just two characters: "ja" and "pan." Each of these characters represents a syllable that makes up the word.

To make things even easier, Japanese has two syllabaries: "hiragana" and "katakana." Hiragana is used for native Japanese words and grammatical particles, while katakana is used for loanwords and foreign names.

Both of these syllabaries contain 46 basic characters each. So if you learn these 92 characters, you'll be well on your way to reading and writing Japanese! Plus, once you've got these down, you can start learning the more complex kanji characters that make up the bulk of written Japanese.