日本語 · Japanese

Three scripts at once, five clean vowels, and a pitch accent that quietly changes words.

Japonic · compare with Mandarin Chinese

🈶 Three scripts at once. Hiragana for grammar, katakana for foreign words, and kanji — which you can read three ways across Japanese, Mandarin and Cantonese.

🎚️ What Japanese does with pitch, stress and rhythm — the layer that isn't spelled.

Sound snapshot

Japanese is built from MORAE, not syllables: every beat takes the same time, and three things count as a beat on their own — ん (a nasal), っ (a held consonant) and the second half of a long vowel. とうきょう Tōkyō is four beats (to-o-kyo-o), not two; にっぽん Nippon is four (ni-p-po-n). Get that timing and you sound Japanese before your vowels are even right. The sound inventory is small and clean: five pure vowels (u is unrounded — /ɯ/, lips relaxed, not English 'oo'), and a consonant grid with five famous holes where the expected sound shifted: si→shi /ɕi/, ti→chi /t͡ɕi/, tu→tsu /t͡sɯ/, hu→fu /ɸɯ/ (blown across the lips, no teeth), zi→ji /d͡ʑi/. There is no stress — but there IS pitch accent, which quietly distinguishes 箸 hashi 'chopsticks' from 橋 hashi 'bridge'.

Grammar chapters

Words by field