Notes

Hiragana is one of four writing systems used in Japanese (the others being katakana, kanji and rōmaji).

It is the first writing system taught to children and consists of 71 single and 36 double characters.

Think of hiragana as the Japanese alphabet. It covers every Japanese sound, so any sentence can be written entirely in it.

Each hiragana character is pronounced only one way, and, with a few exceptions, there are no two characters with the same pronunciation.

Exceptions include じ/ぢ (‘ji’) and ず/づ (‘zu’).

Historically they sounded different, but they are identical in modern Japanese.