Kana

You can't have a Japanese dictionary without a list of kana, it's like a law or something. So here is ours. Each entry has the Hiragana (ひらがな) on the right, the Katakana (カタカナ) on the left and the romaji underneath. For the romaji the most common pronunciation is written first. The pronunciation in brackets can also be used when writing using romaji.

Chart doesn't look right? Check out our language help page or our png kana chart.

You will also come across small characters. ぁァ・ぃィ・ぅゥ・ぇェ・ぉォ・ゃャ・ゅュ・ょョ These characters modify the character that comes before them. See the full chart at the bottom of this page for more details.

Small tsu (tu) [つっ・ツッ]: A small tsu has the effect of doubling the next consonant. Example: School [がっこう・学校] is gakkou - In this case the k of ko is doubled. In speech this doubling simply means stressing the 'k' sound.

Hiragana (ひらがな) and Katakana (カタカナ)

Compound kana

Compound kana use a smaller version of the vowels (and ya [や・ヤ], yu [ゆ・ユ] and yo [よ・ヨ]) to modify the preceding consonant. This list is slightly more comprehensive than most (including our png chart) which only display the xya, xyu and xyo versions, though these are by far the most common as far as I can tell. The top two rows tell you how to write the small characters by themselves.