The Japanese poetic form haiku is said, in English, to have three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, respectively. Thinking of these as we think of syllables can lead to some very clunky poetry. The Japanese are actually counting morae. Where the word haiku is thought of as having two syllables in English it has three morae in Japanese, ha i ku. A mora in Japanese is a V, a CV, or the phoneme /n/, although the /n/ can be the C in a CV combination.