jeffbert: There most certainly is a 'te' ^_^ Are you learning hirigana and katakana as well or just the romanisations of those (ie speaking only).
hmmmm if you do a search on the internet i'm sure you can find a character chart of all hirigana used in Japanese (hence you will know all the 'letters'
. I forgot the proper word for it but Japanese is not really made up of letters, there is a i u e o and n, but the rest are a consonant followed by a vowel forming one 'letter' or character in hirigana. Eg:ka ki ku ke ko, sa shi su se so, ta chi tsu te to (yes slightly confusing t lot), na ni nu ne no, ha hi fu he ho, ma mi mu me mo, ya yu yo, ra ri ru re ro, wa, wo
Now japanese also has a thing called a tenten with are two little not quite vertical lines above and to the right of a character. With these added to the corresponding above characters you get these new sounds:
ga gi gu ge go, za ji zu ze zo, da - - de do, (nothing for n's), ba bi bu be bo.... and i think that's all the new combinations you can get from tenten although IIRC you can make va from wa :S but it's very rarely used (only for katakana which is for forigen words even then they normally use bi or be etc for V sounds).
There is one more character that can be added (in location of a tenten, they can't both be added). Just my luck that i forgot the name of it >_< anyway it looks like a little circle. It adds a p sound:
ha -> pa, fu -> pu, he -> pe, ho -> po
Now the final lesson in Haruka-chan's extremely basic Japanese. There is one other way to combine characters to form new sounds. You may have noticed that there is no pi or di sound for example from what i have said already. That is true in that there is no single character for that sound. Other sounds that appear are cho, chu, cha and sho, shu, sha. Which can also be romanisied as chyo/chiyo (etc) and shyo/shiyo. Maybe you see where these sounds are coming from now ^_^
To form these other sounds you have the main character followed by a visibly reduced smaller character for the second part of the sound eg cho/ chi(yo)
CHIyo
As for pi and di: Pu(i) and De(i)
Now i've left la to last ^^ L sounds is apparently hard for Japanese to pronounce (yes i know i hear it as la when they talk too). They seem to roll the r in a funny way so it actually sounds like an L. However some Japanese actors/actresses/seiyuu (voice actors/actresses) are very good at pronouncing normally difficult sounds L, W, V, 'the'. So when a song as La La La in it, yes it is La La La but how it is written and often said is Ra Ra Ra.
Although as i said before L and R are interchangeable. It is generally said that the character for Ra is written as Ra to avoid confusion. But in writing of English words by Japanese and translation of Japanese words (usually katakana) the R and the L can be interchanged depening on what is meant. Eg, Tezuka's character Lamp is written in katakana using RA however because the name is obviously Lamp and not Ramp an L is used.
A funny point when Japanese use signs for elections that happen to use the English word 'eLection'. They are sometimes confused and use an R when it should be L
