This is a partial table of hiragana. This shows the basic characters.  The  pronunciation is given above each character.  See the pronunciation page for more information on how to pronounce the sounds. 

To see how to write each of the hiragana go here.

These are the characters used to form Japanese words.  Hiragana is kind of like the Japanese alphabet.  Unlike the English alphabet, however, every Japanese character has the exact same sound as it's name and most characters are made of a consonant sound followed by a vowel. This makes it less of an 'alphabet' and more of a 'syllabary'.

The Japanese also use two other character sets. The one for foriegn words is called katakana and the one with characters which represent words or parts of words (not sounds) is called kanji.