I've started teaching Japanese in English #10 Today, we shall complete our Hiragana lesson. I introduce all the rest characters including わをん for you. わゐうゑを wa/i/u/e/o ワヰウヱヲ Korean way: 와이우에오 Vietnamese way: ưa/y/u/e/ô ゐ&ゑ are unused characters today, and they aren't taught at school either. It is said that Japanese language used to have "wi we wo" sounds as with "wa" about 1000 years ago, but they had already lost W sounds and been assimilated into い/え/お sounds as far as 12th century. So that only characters have remained until today. However ゐゑを's pronunciations aren't different from いえお's. The only Japanese character that have W sound is わ. Please let there be no misunderstanding about this. ゐ&ゑ are remained in some brand names or person's names today. For example: ニッカウヰスキー Nikka Whisky ヱビスビール Yebisu Beer ヱヴァンゲリヲン新劇場版:Q Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo ※ ヴ is sometimes used to describe V sound. But isn't taught at school, either. を is called as むずかしいほうの「お」(The difficult O). On the other hand, お is called かんたんなほうの「お」(The easy O). I felt in my childhood that truly difficult character in writing is お. But, this is assigned name. Despite of ゐ&ゑ's corruption, why could を has survived? Because を is one of the important てにをは(Tenioha:postpositional particle) character. てにをは is a key future of Japanese language. In English or Chinese, people make sentences just to put in words. But in Japanese, we add these てにをは almost every words and create different meanings. Korean language takes this way, too. (But I don't know what Korean people call their "てにをは". If you make some SVO sentences in Japanese, を is necessary. For example: つり(fishing) を する(do)。 さかな(a fish)を やく(grill)。 それ(it)を たべる(eat)。 I don't know if you understand now, however, this is the usage of を. And we use を for the purpose of distinguishing てにをは's O from other Os. that's why Japanese have two Os. Once I told you は has two way pronunciation (Ha&Wa). The reason is same. To distinguish てにをは's WA from other WAs, we use different characters. ( Then I said that は is the only character which has 2 pronunciations. But へ also has 2 pronunciations–HE & E. Because へ can be also てにをは character "e"). I declared that we shall complete our Hiragana lesson today. (One of the big reason is that today 8/6 is my birthday, meanwhile, the anniversary of the atomic-bombing of Hiroshima). But, there still remains only one character ん. So I must compose another notebook to finish this lesson. See you later!