Romaji to Hiragana & Katakana Converter

Romaji is the romanization of Japanese characters using the Latin alphabet. It allows non-Japanese speakers to read and type Japanese words using familiar letters. For example, the word for "mountain" is written as "yama" in romaji, which corresponds to the hiragana characters やま. Romaji is commonly used in textbooks, dictionaries, and input methods for typing Japanese on computers and smartphones.

Hiragana and katakana are two of the three writing systems used in Japanese. Hiragana is used primarily for native Japanese words, grammatical particles, verb endings, and words where kanji is not commonly used. Katakana is used mainly for foreign loanwords (such as "computer" written as コンピューター), scientific or technical terms, onomatopoeia, and emphasis. Both systems represent the same set of sounds, but their characters look different.

To type the small tsu (っ in hiragana, ッ in katakana), which indicates a double consonant, simply double the consonant letter in romaji. For example, type "kk" for っk as in "gakkou" (がっこう, meaning school). To type the standalone "n" character (ん in hiragana, ン in katakana), type "n" before a consonant or at the end of a word. If "n" appears before a vowel or "y" and you want ん, use an apostrophe: type "n'a" to get んあ instead of な.

This tool is designed for one-way conversion from romaji to hiragana and katakana. Converting in the reverse direction (kana to romaji) involves different challenges, such as ambiguous readings for certain characters. For reverse conversion, you would need a dedicated kana-to-romaji tool. GyanMirai focuses on romaji-to-kana conversion as it is the most common need for Japanese language learners who are starting out.

There are 46 basic hiragana characters and 46 basic katakana characters, each representing a specific sound in Japanese. In addition to the basic set, there are modified characters created by adding dakuten for 20 additional sounds (such as が, ざ, だ, ば), handakuten for 5 sounds (ぱ through ぽ), and combination characters (yoon) for 33 additional sounds (such as きゃ, しゅ, ちょ). In total, hiragana and katakana can represent over 100 distinct sounds used in Japanese.