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The radical-and-stroke system is cumbersome compared to an alphabetical system in which there are a few characters, all unambiguous. The choice of which components of a logograph comprise separate radicals and which radical is primary is not clear-cut. As a result, logographic languages often supplement radical-and-stroke ordering with alphabetic sorting of a phonetic conversion of the logographs. For example, the kanji word Tōkyō (東京) can be sorted as if it were spelled out in the Japanese characters of the hiragana syllabary as "to-u-ki-_yo-u" (とうきょう), using the conventional sorting order for these characters.^{[citation needed]}