Katakana is usually for foreign words, but there’s a whole class of Japanese-grown rice that has katakana names.
hiragana
There’s a fine line between kindly simplifying the Japanese language and offensively dumbing it down for foreign readers.
Foam shaped into hiragana word reacts to massaging, stroking, and poking with eye-raising exclamations.
You’ll never see these four hiragana on license plates, but maybe not for the reasons you’d expect….
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We’re back and ready to take on the third, and most puzzling, type of Japanese text: katakana.
Ariana Grande is a rising star that many are calling a “mini-Mariah Carey.” Launching onto the world stage after an incredibly successful run on the Nickelodeon show, Victorious, she is quickly gaining fans around the world with her solo music career. She has quite the following in Japan too, with her most recent album, My Everything, peaking at #3 on the weekly Oricon Music charts. And while Japan can’t get enough of her songs and her extremely long hair (extensions), there is something else that her Japanese fans are talking about these days: Ariana Grande is learning hiragana.
The characters above should look very familiar to any student of Japanese. Hiragana is the phonetic alphabet that is usually the first writing system you learn. Compared to the much more complex and difficult to remember Chinese characters and the angular katakana alphabet, the loopy hiragana characters have a pleasant round feel that’s often called “cute.”
But which character is the cutest of them all? Japan weighs in.
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