An American girl recently emailed me and asked how many letters
we use in Japanese.
You know all the English words can be written with those
simple 26 alphabet letters.

I pondered for a while and thought it impossible to tell her
how many letters we actually have in Japan.
It is countless.

In Japanese, we have Hiragana and Katakana, 51 letters for each
and then we have countless numbers of Chinese kanji characters
as well as 26 alphabet letters.

In many cases, Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji are mixed in one sentence.
I am very interested in how I learned Japanese so well!! : )


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