Type romaji into the box above and the hiragana appears as you type. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is installed — the conversion runs in your browser, so it works offline once the page has loaded.
What romaji is
Romaji is Japanese written in the Latin alphabet. It is how Japanese is typed on a standard keyboard, how station names appear on signs for visitors, and usually how a learner meets the language before learning to read it.
It is a transcription of sound, not a script Japanese is actually written in. That matters here, because more than one romanisation system exists. Modified Hepburn spells the sounds as an English speaker would read them — shi, chi, tsu, fu, ji — and is what you see on signage. Kunrei-shiki is more regular and is taught in Japanese schools — si, ti, tu, hu, zi. Both describe the same syllables, and this converter accepts either.
What hiragana is
Hiragana is one of Japan's three writing systems, and the one everything else is built on. It is a syllabary rather than an alphabet: each of its 46 basic characters is a whole syllable, so か is ka — not a k that needs a vowel attached to it.
Modifying marks extend that set. Two small strokes, the dakuten, voice a consonant: か ka becomes が ga. A small circle, the handakuten, turns は ha into ぱ pa. Writing よ small after a character contracts the two into one syllable, so き ki plus small ょ gives きょ kyo.
Unlike romaji, hiragana is unambiguous. Every character has one reading, which is why it is the first thing learners are taught and the script used for furigana above unfamiliar kanji.
How the converter works
It reads your text left to right and takes the longest syllable it recognises at each step, so sha is read as しゃ rather than as さ followed by は. Four rules sit on top of that:
Small tsu (っ). A doubled consonant marks a brief pause before the next sound, written with a small つ. So gakkou gives がっこう and kitte gives きって. Doubled n is deliberately excluded — nn is the syllabic ん, so konnichiwa gives こんに… and never こっに….
Syllabic n (ん). An n becomes ん unless a vowel or y follows it and binds to it instead. nihon ends in ん; na is な. Where the romaji is genuinely ambiguous an apostrophe forces the split, so kin'en gives きんえん (no smoking) rather than きねん (anniversary).
Long vowels. These are written out as vowels, because that is how the word is spelled in kana: ohayou gives おはよう, not おはよー. The long vowel mark ー belongs to katakana. Macrons and circumflexes expand, so Tōkyō gives とうきょう.
Anything unrecognised passes through. Spaces, digits, punctuation and kana already in your text survive unchanged. Nothing is silently dropped, and converting text twice gives the same result as converting it once.
Examples
| Romaji | Hiragana | The rule it shows |
|---|---|---|
| sushi | すし | Basic syllables |
| nihon | にほん | Syllabic ん at the end of a word |
| ohayou | おはよう | Long vowel written out |
| gakkou | がっこう | Doubled consonant becomes っ |
| kyou | きょう | Contracted sound |
| shinkansen | しんかんせん | ん before a consonant |
| kin'en | きんえん | Apostrophe forcing ん |
| arigatou | ありがとう | Dakuten and a long vowel |
One place this stays deliberately literal
konnichiwa converts to こんにちわ, while the greeting is normally written こんにちは.
Both are pronounced the same. The written form uses は because that character is the topic particle, which is spelled ha but said wa. Telling the two apart means knowing that a given wa is a particle, and that is a question about the grammar of the sentence rather than about the sounds in the word.
A converter could special-case the common greetings, but the same sound appears in かわ (river), わたし (I), and any number of names, where わ is correct. Being consistently literal is more useful than being right most of the time and quietly wrong the rest — so type ha wherever you want は, and he wherever you want へ.
When you would use this
- Learning to write. You can say a word and want to see how it is actually spelled in kana.
- No Japanese keyboard. You need kana on a machine where you cannot install an input method, for a form or a search box.
- Checking someone else's romaji. You have a name or a place written in the Latin alphabet and want the kana behind it.
- Preparing study material. Converting a vocabulary list into kana to practise reading it.
If you are learning to read rather than to type, it is worth working through the kana chart itself at some point — a converter is quicker, but it does the part of the work that is worth learning.