Hiragana is one of the two Japanese kana, or syllabaries; it's the one that is actually used to write Japanese words. (The other one, katakana, is used for words or names of foreign origin.) Where an alphabet has symbols that correspond to the simplest units of sound, like 'k' or 't', a syllabary has symbols corresponding to whole syllables, like 'ka', or 'ta', etc.
Hiragana are pretty. There is (unsurprisingly) a good table of them here, but it requires one to have Japanese language support. If that doesn't work, I could write some for you the next time we see one another in person.
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Date: 2006-01-16 07:57 am (UTC)Hiragana are pretty. There is (unsurprisingly) a good table of them here, but it requires one to have Japanese language support. If that doesn't work, I could write some for you the next time we see one another in person.
-Andy H.