The Japanese Alphabet: Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji

Written Japanese combines three sets of characters, each used for a different purpose.

Hiragana and katakana are syllabaries, where each character stands for a whole syllable (such as ka or mi) rather than a single letter; the only characters that represent a single sound are the vowels.

Kanji, by contrast, are logograms, each standing for a meaning or a whole word.

A typical sentence mixes all three: kanji for the main words, hiragana for the grammar around them, and katakana for anything borrowed from another language.

Japanese is spoken by around 125 million people, according to Ethnologue.

Hiragana is the first script learners meet, and the first that Japanese children learn at school.

Its 46 basic characters cover every sound in the language, and it is used for native Japanese words and for the grammatical parts of a sentence, such as verb endings and particles. Its rounded, flowing shapes make it the foundation of reading and writing, and small hiragana (called furigana) are often printed beside difficult kanji to show how they are read.

Katakana has the same 46 sounds as hiragana but a separate set of sharper, more angular characters.

It is used mainly for words borrowed from other languages, for foreign names and places, and for onomatopoeia.

One of the first things a learner is often asked to do is write their own name in katakana.

If you speak English you will recognise many katakana words once you sound them out, because so many are borrowed from English.

Kanji are characters borrowed from Chinese, each representing a concept or word, and they are used for nouns, verbs, adjectives and names.

Tens of thousands exist in total, but you do not need anywhere near that many: literacy rests on the roughly 2,136 everyday characters (the jōyō kanji) taught through Japanese schooling. Each kanji can have more than one reading depending on context, which is part of what makes them the most challenging of the three systems, and why hiragana is often printed alongside to help.

Rōmaji is the writing of Japanese in the Latin alphabet. It dates back to the 16th century, when Portuguese Jesuit missionaries first transcribed Japanese in their own spelling; the system most used today is the later Hepburn romanisation.

You will see rōmaji on some signs, in dictionaries and textbooks, and on keyboards, and it is a useful bridge for beginners, though the goal is to move on to reading the kana and kanji themselves.

Japanese can be written in two directions. The traditional style, still used in novels, newspapers and formal writing, runs in vertical columns, top to bottom, with the columns ordered right to left. The modern style, common in textbooks, business, science and anything digital, runs horizontally from left to right, just like English. Both are completely normal, and you will meet both.

These are the 46 basic hiragana with their rōmaji readings.

The same sounds again, in katakana.

Beyond the basic 46, a couple of simple marks and combinations extend the set.

Two small strokes (dakuten) turn a sound voiced: か ka becomes が ga, さ sa becomes ざ za, た ta becomes だ da, and は ha becomes ば ba. A small circle (handakuten) turns は ha into ぱ pa. And a small ya, yu or yo combines with an i-sound to make contracted syllables, so き ki plus small ya gives きゃ kya.

The same marks work in both hiragana and katakana.

Start with hiragana, then katakana, before tackling kanji.

Learn the kana in the correct stroke order from the beginning, using a chart or workbook, because good stroke order makes your writing legible and easier to remember.

Mnemonics help, associating a character's shape with a picture or word, and for kanji it helps to learn them in small, regular batches rather than all at once.

Reading and listening to plenty of real Japanese, from graded readers to anime in the original with subtitles, then reinforces the characters in context.

The Japanese alphabet is really three writing systems used together: hiragana (46 characters, for native words and grammar), katakana (46 characters, for foreign words and names) and kanji (logograms from Chinese, with about 2,136 in everyday use), supported by rōmaji in the Latin alphabet.

Japanese can be written vertically (top to bottom, right to left) or horizontally (left to right).

Begin with hiragana, learn the stroke order, and build up gradually.

Mastering a new script is exactly the kind of challenge SPRACHCAFFE's immersive method is built for.