Hiragana is a Syllabary, meaning each character represents a syllable or vowel. Hiragana is the standard, phonetic writing system in Japanese and is used for grammatical words or particles (eg. は、を (wa - Subject particle, o - Object Particle)); words that don't have Kanji characters (eg. こんにちは (kon'nichiwa - hello)); or for beginners to write Kanji. The symbols were originally adopted from Kanji characters and have changed overtime into their distinct, rounded shapes (e.g 以 →い).