The Japanese language has one of the most complex writing systems in the world; not only does it use thousands of Chinese characters, but it’s also the only language where four different scripts can appear together in the same sentence.

In the following chapter you are going to learn the difference between these scripts, why and how they should be used, and the best way and order in which to learn them.

First Japanese texts were written with kanji (漢字), ideographic characters imported from China. This writing system, conceived primarily for the completely different Chinese language, was far from ideal for the representation of the Japanese language.

As Chinese characters started to be used to write Japanese words, a writing system called man’yōgana that used a number of Chinese characters for their sound was developed and, later on, evolved into hiragana & katakana syllabaries (collectively called kana) that started to be used together with kanji. This allowed to adapt the writing system to the specifics of Japanese, yet keep the benefits of using kanji.

In present-day Japanese, the average rate of kanji use in sentences is approximately 30%
— KAIHO (1980 p. 47)

At first you will probably think that kanji are useless and an unnecessary burden existing purely to annoy hard working students. After you learn several hundreds of them, however, you will start to understand how important they are, hate to read texts written in pure kana, and possibly even enjoy learning them. Take a look at a few kanji to see what kind of thing you’ll be learning eventually:

In recent years, with the arrival of computers, the importance of knowing how to write kanji has diminished. However, despite what many foreign learners of Japanese may say, their importance has by no means diminished.

As Japanese people don’t need to write texts by hand as often as before, and the entry of kanji characters with a mobile phone or a PC only requires the knowledge of the reading of compounds in which the kanji is used, the Japanese habitually use more characters than before the technological revolution. Even if you don’t learn how to write all of the commonly used kanji, you must at least master their recognition to survive in a Japanese work or educational environment.

Some textbooks aim to teach kanji according to how many strokes they have, how closely they resemble the pictures from which they have derived or what school year Japanese children first encounter them. The main two reasons why foreign learners should learn to write kanji are:

• To aid their reading ability
• To write real Japanese sentences

It is for this reason that in this course, you will learn kanji based on how useful they are to you. For example, there is no point in learning how to write the kanji character 屯 at an early stage, as although it’s quite easy to write and remember, you’re unlikely to come across it in anything but the most advanced of texts.

Equally, it would be a waste of your time to learn the kanji character 糸, which Japanese pupils learn in the very first year, as there is little chance that you will have to write about threading at this stage in your Japanese ability.

Kanji are known linguistically as pictographs, that is that they represent concept or idea in the form of a symbol. We have this idea in English, that symbols have their own ‘concept’ and pronunciation. Some symbols are derivative from something visually recognisable as the origin of the symbol, and others are quite abstract.

Many kanji have very close links to the original ideas that they represent, others are far more abstract, and just need a bit of time dedicated to their learning. See how the following kanji have been derived from the images that they represent:

In addition to these quite literal representations of physical things, there are also more abstract kanji. Take a look at the table below. There are two symbols that without context are meaningless, analogous to what kanji are.

symbol	meaning	reading
?	uncertainty	‘question mark’
♥	love, affection	‘heart’, ‘love’
★	star	‘star’

So in addition to having an underlying ‘concept’ or ‘meaning,’ there is also a specific ‘reading’ or literal way of pronouncing the symbol. This often changes with context:

Absence makes the ♥ grow stronger.
Absence makes the heart grow stronger.

I ♥ you.
I love you.

The placing of the symbol in an English sentence means that we read the kanji in a different way. Kanji are like this, in that every kanji has multiple ways they can be said aloud. How you know which of the multiple readings to use, is to know how a word which uses the kanji pronounces that kanji.

Let’s take a look at three words:

The first word we will look at is the word for wind, which is kaze. When written in kanji, it appears like this: 風. The second word we will look at is the word for ‘rain’ which is ame, written in kanji liks this: 雨. The sound we associate with these kanji when we see them alone is the single word that they are used to represent.

If we combine the kanji however, we get a brand new word, 風雨 (which just means windy and rainy weather). Rather than use the readings (sounds) of the two separate words, we use a different ‘reading,’ which is fuu. This means that because these two kanji are being used together in this order, the way we read each individual kanji has changed. More about why this is is coming up later in the chapter.

We have just seen how we can combine two or more symbols to represent a merging of ideas. Let’s take a seemingly complicated Japanese word to show just how useful kanji can be, and how they are a lot less intimidating to master than first meets the eye. The word we are going to look at is the word for ‘nuclear power station.’

You might think that this is is a bizarre first compound to learn in in the second chapter of a textbook. It is. However, the great thing about kanji is that you don’t need to have learned the word to work out its meaning, only the kanji.

Through constantly being exposed to kanji, you’ll get to know their shapes, proportions and elements that make them up. It’s a bit more fun than just learning kanji one by-one separately to how kanji are actually used.

To demonstrate this point, let’s break down the above word, which is formed of six separate kanji, in what we know as a ‘kanji compound’, that is two or more kanji combined to create a word in Japanese. Please don’t feel like you have to take in any of this information, just the conceptual idea is good enough for now!

This word can be broken down in to four separate elements:

Just by putting together the words ‘atom,’ ‘power,’ ‘generation’ and ‘place or location,’ we can pretty quickly work out that the word in front of us is ‘nuclear power station.’ How did we know that it was broken down into these four parts? It wasn’t because we knew the word, but because we were familiar with the kanji that made up the words.

Take the compound 原子, meaning ‘atom.’ This constitutes the character 原 and 子. Both characters that can be learned relatively easily, together the word ‘atom’ is quite easily worked out. 力 is a very simple two-stroke kanji. 発電 is a great compound made up of the kanji for ‘departure from’ or ‘origin of’ and ‘electricity’ combined, and 所 can be added to almost any compound to say that it represents a place at which something happens.

The beauty of kanji is that your vocabulary is vaster than you think it is. Say that you already knew the kanji for water was 水, it’s very easy to work out that 水力発電 is the generation of electricity using water rather than nuclear material, written as 原子力発電.

Each new kanji you learn is not just one piece of vocabulary, but the key to learning, and remembering tens, and maybe even hundreds of Japanese words.

The human brain is best at recollecting information that is stored in more than one way (for example, it is much easier to remember someone you saw, heard and even touched than the voice or image alone) and you will be amazed at how your associative memory will make kanji and vocabulary learning a breeze if you’re taught in the right way.

This is a difficult question as it depends entirely on what you are planning to do with your Japanese. First of all, any Japanese sentence can be written entirely in hiragana, or even katakana (more on this later). However, you will rarely meet such texts, as you’ll get more advanced, you’ll hate to read them, and if you’ll keep writing everything in kana, nobody will ever appreciate it.

Common kanji

It is said that there are over 100,000 kanji characters in existence, however, only a fraction of those are actually used. An average well-educated Japanese person knows around 5000 kanji, but in non-professional literature and newspapers you generally won’t encounter more than 2000–3000 characters, 1000 of them should be enough to read 90% of newspaper content, and 500 to read 60%.

The best long term target are the jōyō kanji—a regularly revised list of 2136 (as of 2010) characters which the Japanese have to learn by the end of high school. As long as you don’t try to read some very advanced, specialized, or outdated books you won’t have problems understanding the text if you’ll know the kanji on this list.

Name kanji

One important exception are Japanese names. Unfortunately everyone tried trying to distinguish their children by writing their names with obscure characters, or choosing characters with unrelated readings purely for symbolical reasons (see the Cultural note below). This resulted in an big number of very strange kanji with even more uncommon readings to be used in Japanese names.

Nowadays there is an official list of 985 name kanji (jinmeiyō kanji) that, together with the jōyō kanji and kana, are allowed to be used in names. Still, it is one more thousand of kanji characters most of which you’ll rarely write yourself, but which you may have to read from time to time.

Hiragana (ひらがな) is one of the two Japanese syllabaries (sets of symbols representing syllables). The ‘look’ of hiragana is a lot more simplistic than kanji, and it is often said to be ‘curvier’ than the other Japanese scripts.

You’ll get a chance to explore hiragana in much more depth in the next lesson, so for now, just take a look at a sample of some characters and notice how different they are to kanji.

Hiragana has a variety of uses and its mastery is essential to learn Japanese. Let’s take a look at some of the uses:

Particles, suffixes, verb & adjective inflections

Particles are a grammatical tool that provide structure and form to Japanese sentences. Once you’ve identified where the particles are in a sentence, you’ll be able to work out what it’s trying to say. Thankfully, particles are always in hiragana and are easy to spot:

Native Japanese words with no kanji

There are instances where there are words that never quite had a kanji to represent them, or simply over time lost their kanji. The word さようなら is an example of this as although the three characters さよう can be represented in kanji, these days you’ll never see them and さようなら is treated as a word in its own right.

Words with obscure or overly complicated kanji

As you will have seen, there are only a limited number of kanji that are used in every day life and often it’s easier to write a word in hiragana rather than kanji as the kanji used are just too difficult or take too long to write. This even happens with relatively simple kanji, such as the fact that the word 良い is often written as いい.

Katakana (カタカナ)—characterized by short, straight strokes and angular corners—is the simplest of the Japanese scripts, but the similarity of the characters also makes it the more difficult to read and learn for a beginner.

Just as hiragana has distinct uses, katakana does too:

Words and names of foreign origin

Whenever you say a name of a foreign origin in a Japanese accent, you’re making an approximation based on the sounds that are used in Japanese (and there are far fewer in Japanese than in English and romance languages). Therefore, names are represented in katakana so they are pronounced in a standardised ‘Japanese way’. Let’s take a look at some examples:

This means that every very common words such as ‘bread’ are written in katakana (パン) – as it was only through Dutch trading links that the Japanese were introduced to bread, and they simply adopted the native word for it. The likelihood is that if you have a grasp of one or two European languages, you’ll be able to comprehend the vast majority of what is written in katakana, as the words will be words that you use every day yourself!

Onomatopoeia (animal noises and other sounds)

One thing that you’ll grow to love about Japanese is the volume of onomatopoeic words used in everyday speech. Many are written in katakana. Here are a few…

Emphasis (cf. italics in western languages)

So, the word for ‘fool’ or ‘idiot’ is 馬鹿, made up of the kanji for ‘horse’ and ‘deer’ (according to legend, it’s because only a fool can’t tell the difference between a horse and a deer), but you’ll more likely see it written in katakana, like this: バカ.

Commonly known as latin alphabet outside of Japan, rōmaji is never used by native Japanese speakers to write full sentences, yet it’s widely used all over Japanese media. You already know it as it’s the script in which this text is written!

The latin script has a modern, cool vibe to it which is why many new Japanese companies prefer it to kanji for use in logotypes and advertisement, fashionable magazines use it in headlines, and Japanese TV shows overflow with silly English exclamations.

In addition to that, newspapers don’t mind using English abbreviations, some young people use it for interjections in online conversations, and most street signs in major Japanese cities display transliterated names and instructions under their Japanese counterparts. It really is commonplace in Japan.

Japanese is quite unique in that it can be written both from right to left in vertical columns (called tategaki) and left to right in horizontal lines (called yokogaki).

Horizontal writing was first used during the Meiji period (1868–1912) in Western language dictionaries of Japanese. Initially, the dictionaries were printed in a mixture of horizontal Western and vertical Japanese text, which meant that the book had to be rotated, but this proved to be very uncomfortable.

As kana and kanji characters are nearly equally well adapted to vertical and horizontal writing systems, both orientations are used today. Most novels, newspapers and manga are written vertically with pages progressing to the left. Scientific books, on the other hand, are commonly written horizontally and work identically to their Western counterparts. Postcards and handwritten letters may be written either way, but the more formal the letter, the more likely it is going to use tategaki.

In addition to these two systems, right-to-left horizontal writing can also be seen in Japan. Historically, tategaki with one character per column was used where vertical text could not fit, for example on horizontal signs and newspaper captions.

In the Meiji era, when some publications started to transition to yokogaki, entire Japanese texts were seldom written right-to-left, similarly to Arabic or Hebrew. Nowadays, right-to-left inscriptions can still be seen on some signs, as well as on the right-hand side of vehicles and stands.

Your video treat for the end of this lesson is a not-to-be-taken-seriously look at sushi bar etiquette!

Hiragana & katakana cheat sheet

Before you move on

• Compare texts written in Chinese, Korean and Japanese
• Print out the Hiragana & katakana cheat sheet and explore which hiragana characters (to the left of the romaji) look similar to their katakana counterparts (to the right)
• Visit Japanese websites and try pointing out the different scripts