to Japanese speakers and Learners alike it's no secret that writing Japanese is an arduous and complex process since it has thousands of characters all with their own unique pronunciation and meaning it can be quite tricky for a lot of Learners usually when people first learn Japanese they learn the Japanese syllabaries hiragana and Katakana collectively known as Kan but there's a whole world of K outside of what is commonly taught a lot of which isn't even known by native Japanese speakers so today I will explain the Lesser known types of K and their functions so if that interests you be sure to watch till the end because things get stranger and stranger the deeper we go I'd like to shout out two YouTube channels that have helped a lot in the research for this video the first one being Shia's Channel and his series kna they don't teach you in school it's been super helpful for me and it's pretty informative if you're interested in these more OB skure aspects of Japanese I'd also like to recommend ntoa and their video you don't know hiragana yet this one's really interesting too but this one is in Japanese so if you don't know Japanese or aren't super comfortable with it then it might be hard to understand but there are subtitles I think they're autogenerated English subtitles so there are two kinds of rare Kaa there are the obsolete Kor and there are hent obsolete Kor are the characters that did have some standardized use in Japanese but we're eventually phased out and hent are colloquial characters that see some use but in rare and specific contexts let's go over obsolete K first because it's the easiest to explain and they're the ones that you will most likely see so there are two obsolete kna or I guess four of them for the sounds wi and wet let's go over Wii first because Wii is used much more than wet in fact W is almost never used usually we is used in some okan words an example of a word being wagu which means female and wean which means now it's also used as digraphs so a diaph are those combination characters you'll see when there is a big kna and a small kna next to it these combinations that are used to make sounds that don't have their own specific characters sounds like Cho we can be used in digraphs for sounds like qu and gu in Okinawan an example is the word qu which means food probably the most iconic example of the weon would be a naika whiskey so the whiskey brand naika they will write Whiskey on their bottles using the Katakana wheat so instead of writing it Uki they'll write Uki even though the word whiskey in Japanese typically doesn't use the we Katakana naika uses it in order to to give them a distinct brand identity and make them Stand Out amongst competitors fictional names will use them too like the Toho character Inaba tewi technically it's pronounced te not tewi but I say tewi for the purpose of this video because she has the wi hiragana in her pronunciation the creator of the manga ni Joo actually uses a pen name arawi Ki wet is pretty much never used now but it has been used his historically it was used in the writing of some kanji like this kanji right here which means Yen nowadays it's pronounced n but back in the day it actually used to be written like this which is pronounced n but it's written as when the next type of Kaa which makes up the bulk of strange and obscure Kaa is hent so hent translates to variant characters they existed in the past and used to be super common and they're ESS different variations of what are the modern day standard Kaa sort of like how in English you can write the letter A like this and also like this while back in the day you could write the character ah in all of these different ways Pentagon used to be more common but a Japanese governmental language reform ended up phasing out a lot of them by standardizing Kaa if you look at the Kor chart though you will notice three spaces where there are blanks and these these are the spaces where ye yet and woo would be now you would think that this is because y yet and wo don't exist in the Japanese language but they kind of do there are some Japanese words that have y and ye pronunciations an example being the word yay which comes from the English word yay but these are written with digraphs so the word yay is written like this so you'll have the E and then you'll have a small e in order to make the yet sound in order to make the ye sound you'll have an e and then another smaller e next to it as far as woo goes I haven't found any Japanese words that have that sound in it the closest one I could come to is a Japanese pronunciation of the Roman god Vulcan which is pronounced wur the only one of these Kaa that actually even has a Unicode symbol is the hirana ye I don't know why this has a Unicode symbol and the others don't I have never seen this anywhere except on Wikipedia but it has a Unicode symbol htig doesn't refer to all non-standard kna only the single syllable ones there are actually kna that are written with multiple syllables which sounds antithetical to the idea of kna being that it's a syllabary where one character represents one syllable but these multi- syllabic Kor actually used to be super common gyaku Gama are Kaa that represent combinations of K or specific words words they're sort of similar to how the Amper sand or an at symbol Works in English these are distinctly separate from Kani though since they formed as a way to make writing kanji quicker versus kanji which were Chinese characters that were adapted to Japanese in fact hiragana and Katakana came from kanji and G yakana came from Kan some examples of gugo are kot Yori and Tomo but there are a lot of them these characters were widely used until they were completely taken out of Japanese during a year 1900 language reform you can see old Japanese documents and signs from before 1900 and CV's characters there and sometimes they're used artistically to convey a sense of quaintness and Antiquity so all the Kor that I've showed previously have been completely separate characters from the standard Kor that are taught in school but there are actually quite a bit of K that exist as modifications of the standard characters using diacritics diacritics in Japanese are The Strokes that are added to cona characters to modify their sounds there are two of these in Japanese dakuten which looks like two dots and honden which is a circle colloquially they're called tenen which means dots and M which means circle tenen is used to indicate that a consonant should be voiced for example the character C is pronounced G when it uses a tenent so it goes from the unvoiced C to a voiced G consonant sound the usage of Maru are more specific and they are used on H or F consonants so in the base set of K there is and when you put muu on these it turns into po PE p pet p in standard Japanese diacritics are only used with voiceless consonants the voiceless consonants in Japanese being t h and but in some dialects of Japanese diacritics can be added to vo cona to make all sorts of sounds the most salant example of these would be B which are nasal sounds Bon are made when you put Maru on a Kaa that has a c consonant this ends up making a sound like in King or sing the Bon sounds are and now these characters right here are only used when teaching certain dialects and accents of Japanese they are not used in everyday writing you will never see anyone write these the sounds that I just read off are sometimes used in the Tokyo dialect of Japanese also known as toen in standard Japanese this sentence is pronounced wat which means I am but in Tokyo this can be pronounce which means the same thing but the pronunciation is slightly different the too Ben turns the voiced G sound into AA a nasal sound so using hirana displays the sound now you might be thinking to yourself well why do that Japanese already has a hirana for the M sound so why not just write that well the reason why is because of how the Japanese syllables work so in Japanese each syllable gets its own allotted space in a word and M is considered its own syllable so if I writeing like this it's not it'sing not only is it longer because the M sound has the same space pronunciation as the G sound but it doesn't soften the G it stays as a voiced consonant and not a nasal takes twice as much time to say as if we're going to put this in English terms it's sort of similar to the word singer you say singer not singer probably the most common abnormal use of diacritics is using them on sounds that have no consonants like a e o adding diacritics on these sounds turns them into a more rough dirty sound it would be ah this is pretty much only used in manga though you won't really see it anywhere else 101 can also turn the U Ka into Vu so from a vow sound to a v sound the final use of diacritics that I want to go over is their use in conon now I'm not going to go super deep into conon because conon is a whole other video in itself Kon is a system of pronunciation for classical Chinese so back in the day the Japanese Elite would write in classical Chinese but they had a specific syllabary in order to write the Japanese pronunciation of these Chinese characters it was sort of like the predecessor to fuig but the conon used for classical Chinese is very different than what fuig Gana is today actually let me show you this this poster that I had on my wall back there actually has conon on it so what's written here actually isn't Japanese it's classical Chinese and all the little characters that you see next to the Chinese characters are kbon and that's the Japanese pronunciation of these characters of course it's not the pronunciation of the characters now because classical Chinese isn't spoken in Japan anymore or really anywhere in the world and with that little showand tell I'll put an end to my needlessly complex video on characters that almost nobody uses or needs to know how to use but if you enjoyed it and you learned something today thank thank you so much for watching I appreciate you a ton in the last video I said that I typically don't like asking people to subscribe and that's true but I'm trying to get my channel to 1,000 Subs so that way I can monetize my videos which would help me out greatly if I could get some money from doing this as much as I love making these videos my personal life is pretty busy and I work a lot and having a little bit of extra income on top of what I do make would help me a ton so if you like this video be sure to subscribe I guarantee you you won't regret it there's a lot of great videos coming in the future once again thank you so much I will see you all in the next video goodbye