Useful Japanese phrases. アニメ・マンガの日本語 Japanese in Anime & Manga. 『「The Art Of、 Japanese Punctuation〜」。』！？ Learn Japanese. Hiragana. Hiragana (平仮名, ひらがな?) Is a Japanese syllabary, one basic component of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana, kanji, and in some cases rōmaji (the Latin-script alphabet). Hiragana is used to write native words for which there are no kanji, including grammatical particles such as から kara "from", and suffixes such as さん ~san "Mr., Mrs., Miss, Ms. " Likewise, hiragana is used to write words whose kanji form is obscure, not known to the writer or readers, or too formal for the writing purpose. There is also some flexibility for words that have common kanji renditions to be optionally written instead in hiragana, according to an individual author's preference. Verb and adjective inflections, as, for example, be-ma-shi-ta (べました) in tabemashita (食べました?
, "ate"), are written in hiragana, often following a verb or adjective root (here, "食") that is written in kanji. There are two main systems of ordering hiragana, the old-fashioned iroha ordering, and the more prevalent gojūon ordering. Learn Japanese.