How tall is your favorite hiragana?

If you’ve ever studied Japanese before, then you know that the written language uses three writing systems. There’s kanji, the complicated characters that can represent pretty much anything; katakana, phonetic characters used to spell foreign words; and hiragana, phonetic characters used for Japanese words.

And while learning how to read and write all three writing systems is an endeavor that usually takes many years, even those who have studied them at length still don’t know the answer to one question: how tall are each of the hiragana?

The answer has eluded us, until now, thanks to a video posted by Japanese Twitter user @aramatypo:

▼ “I put all of the hiragana in order of height.”
(Click the video to watch.)

If you watch the video, you can see each of the 46 hiragana coming up to the kanji 背 (“height”). They go up one by one, as if they’re a class of students getting measured up for gym class.

And… are we weird for thinking it’s kind of cute? We can just imagine each character, silently hoping on the inside that they’ve grown taller than last year. Or perhaps that they’ll be noticed by their crush あ or complimented by senpai を or at least they won’t be laughed at by the angsty ん.

There’s also something satisfying about watching the little bar go up and down, and then get the number for each character, down to the decimal point. We’re not exactly sure what units are being used to measure them — it doesn’t look like pixels, it feels like it’s approximating centimeters — but it still has a nice flow to it.

Here’s how Japanese netizens reacted to the short video:

“I don’t know why but I was super excited to see if ら could beat out う.”
“I was shocked to see such a difference between ろ and る.”
“ね and れ, and ぬ and め too!”
“That 背 is a little too tall and kinda weird….”
“う is too powerful.”

▼ If you’re interested in more Japanese-language videos/photos,
they also posted this idea for what a kanji fighting game could look like…

▼ …and did a whole series making pieces using items that all start with the same hiragana.
This one for ha has ha (“teeth”), hanko (“name stamp”), hane (“wing”) and more.

Be sure to check out their Twitter if you want to see more hiragana love, and in the meantime if you think you’ve mastered all of the hiragana, why not try giving these strange characters a read?

Source: Twitter/@aramatypo via My Game News Flash
Featured image: Twitter/@aramatypo
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