Fig. 1

How to play Shiritori. The illustration is an example of playing Japanese word chain game “Shiritori” in the case of two players, where the pronounced Japanese words are written in Romanized letters and segmented by hyphens into syllables, with the English translations shown in parentheses and the Japanese notation shown as [in kana character, in kanji character]. Say the player 1 starts the chain with the word no-u with the cue syllable (underlined) u, the next player 2 could say u-ta, and the player 1 ta-i-ko, then the player 2 ko-do-mo, and the player 1 mo-me-n, which means the player 1 lost the game because the consonant /n/ is never used to begin Japanese nouns but does occasionally end them (i.e. it constitutes closed syllables exclusively)