how many letters are there in the japanese alphabet?

Answer 1

alots! they are countless

Answer 2

The Japanese do not use an alphabet system but use a syllabary system. There are three main types of written Japanese
Hiragana
Katakana
Kanji
The hiragana syllabary consists of 48 syllables and katakana syllabary also consists of 48 syllables. Kanji can range from 5000-10000 characters

Answer 3

There are 3 character sets used in Japanese, plus English letters (the latter are called Roma-ji for Roman letters).

Two of the characters sets are equivalent, and have 46 sounds/syllables (known as mora in Japanese).

Think of English, we have lowercase and UPPERCASE characters. Are a and A the same letter? Well, in Japanese, there are two ways of writing each sound. One way is called hiragana, and is usually used for Japanese words or parts of words like verb endings The other is called katakana, and is usually used for foreign words or for emphasis, a bit like BOLD or italics in English.

The 46 current base sounds are: a i u e o, ka ki ku ke ko, sa shi su se so, ta chi tsu te to, na ni nu ne no, ha hi hu he ho, ra ri ru re ro, ma mi mu me mo, wa wo, ya yu yo, n . One can also create more sounds by adding a modifier, which would change ta into da, or ha into ba. But these are not considered new letters.

Furthermore, Japanese also uses Kanji, or Chinese characters. These are ideographs, and cannot be considered letters in the same sense as in English. There are many kanji, but the government requires students to learn 1945 "common-use" kanji by the end of high school. A further 983 are commonly used in people's names as well as in place names. While there are many more rarely used kanji, if they are used, the pronunciation is usually written along with it.

So the correct answer to the question is
46 hiragana characters
46 katakana characters (same sounds as hiragana, so choose if you want to count them or not, like A and a in English).
1,945 common kanji
983 kanji for names


In addition to this, western letters (English letters) are sometimes used - romaji.

Answer 4

They don't have an alphabet... Its a polyphonic language.

Phrases are built from characters... and there's tens of thousands of characters.

Answer 5

46 basic hiragana (not counting combinations)
あいうえお
かきくけこ
さしすせそ
たちつてと
なにぬねの
はひふへほ
まみむめも
やゆよ
らりるれろ
わをん
46 basic katakana
アイウエオ
カキクケコ
サシスセソ
タチツテト
ナニヌネノ
ハヒフヘホ
マミムメモ
ヤユヨ
ラリルレロ
ワヲン
about 1945 official "joyo" kanji
(see http://www.kanjisite.com/index.html)

Good luck!

Answer 6

They don't have letters, they have characters.