They don't make internal sense because they're originally derived from Kanji/Hanzi and more or less arbitrary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana#History h

They don't make internal sense because they're originally derived from Kanji/Hanzi and more or less arbitrary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana#History As a Chinese speaker learning the kana, I found knowing the etymology of the kana somewhat useful as a learning tool, but obviously this is of no help if you don't already know Chinese. Also, Mandarin (and other Northern Chinese) pronunciations have changed quite a bit more than southern dialects, so knowing Cantonese is more helpful than Mandarin, e.g. か 'ka' comes from 加, which is 'jia' in Mandarin but 'ga' in Cantonese A syllabary that 'makes sense' would be Korean Hangul, where the relationships between the various parts of the mouth were purposefully encoded into the relationships between the components of glyphs.