The Three Kinds of Characters

There are two ways that you’ll see Japanese characters written on a page: (1) horizontally, from left to
right, like English and (2) vertically, from top to bottom and from right to left.

If you study Japanese in school, there’s a good chance they’ll have you write horizontally, from left to
right.

However, if you read a novel, or any upper-level reading material, chances are that it will be written
from top to bottom and from right to left. So, you’d start at the top right of the page and go down the
rightmost column of characters. You’d end at the bottom of the leftmost column of characters. It’s not
too hard to read like this, thanks to the way Japanese characters are written.

There are three kinds of Japanese characters:

Kanji (kahn-jee) 漢字
Hiragana (hee-rah-gah-nah) ひらがな
Katakana (ka-ta-ka-na) カタカナ
All three of them are used together in sentences. It’s usually pretty obvious when to use which one.
You might hear people sometimes refer to hiragana and katakana as simply ‘kana.’

Japanese Writing System

Hiragana & Katakana

Hiragana and Katakana are not hard to learn. They are both used to represent the sound syllables that
make up the Japanese language. So, for instance, ‘ka’ in hiragana/katakana would be か/カ.

Each of these syllabaries (alphabets) has 46 basic characters (sounds).

Hiragana is usually used to represent Japanese words and grammatical elements (e.g. particles), while
Katakana is usually used for words of foreign origin.

So, for example, sumimasen, which means “sorry” or “excuse me,” would be written in hiragana,
because it’s a word of Japanese origin: すみません。

However, a word like nekutai, which means (get this) “necktie,” would be written in katakana, because
it’s a foreign loan word: ネクタイ。

Often these loan words will just be English words with a Japanese pronunciation, like the example just
shown. The cool thing about this is that once you learn katakana, you more or less will have learned to
read thousands of words in Japanese. This is why katakana is a great syllabary to learn if you’re just
going to Japan for a short trip. It will come in handy, I promise.

Now, for your perusal, here are the complete lists of both hiragana and katakana characters:
Complete Hiragana Chart
Complete Katakana Chart

You might notice that a lot of katakana characters look just like hiragana characters, only more rigid.
Hopefully those charts aren’t too intimidating. Below I’ll give you some tips to shark-tackling them in no
time.

Kanji
Before I even start, I gotta say: If you want to learn Japanese, then learn Kanji. It will seem impossible
(it’s not). It will seem negligible (it’s not). You’ll meet people who are downright awesome at speaking
Japanese that absolutely suck at kanji. Don’t be tempted!

I am, of course, talking to people who are in this for the long haul. If you’re going to Japan in a month
and just want to have some conversations with Japanese people, then forget kanji. But if you want to
read manga and books, to understand random stuff that flashes in bright colors on every single Japanese
show you ever see, if you want to see a new, difficult word and already know what it means (though you
might not know how to pronounce it), if you want to get a job in Japan, if you want to do anything that
involves Japanese professionally, then start learning kanji now.

It will be really, really hard. And I’m sorry for that. But as long as we keep moving forward, we can learn
just about anything we want. The trick is to study mainichi mainichi (literally, “every day every day” –>
“day in, day out”).

That aside, let’s talk about kanji.

The Purpose of Kanji

Long story short, the kanji come from China. They are, technically, Chinese characters that the Japanese
adopted a long time ago in order to write their language.

Kanji represent meaning (unlike katakana and hiragana) and sound (like katakana and hiragana). Worry
about their meaning first and their sound second (though you should learn both simultaneously).

For instance, it’s more important to know that 山 means mountain than it is to know that it is
pronounced “ya-ma” or “san.” Still, ideally, you should know both of these things. Then, when you see
a word like 火山 (“fire” + “mountain”), it won’t be too much of a stretch to find out that it means
“volcano.” But it’s even more helpful if you can guess that it’s pronounced “ka-zan”.

(Ya, sometimes an ‘s’ will become a ‘z’, making ‘san’–>’zan’ in this case. You’ll pick up lots of things like
that in studying Japanese, though no one will probably ever explain it to you adequately… maybe in a
future lesson!)

This might seem not all that important, but the formation of words using different kanji, to me, is super
fascinating! Sometimes, you get a little bit of a glimpse as to how we humans see the world, all through
something as simple as understanding a volcano to be a fire-mountain. More insights will follow, but I’ll
leave them for you to look forward to.
Learning Kanji
Japanese people are expected to learn around 2,000 kanji by the time they finish Junior high school.
These are the characters you’ll be expected to learn if you want to enter a Japanese university, pass the
JLPT tests, and read most of books, magazines, manga, and school textbooks.

Some are simple (1-3 strokes); some are complicated (20+ strokes!); some are pictographic (like how 山
actually looks like a mountain); some are symbolic. We will learn them all!

Now, I’m sorry to do this, but here is a chart of most of the kanji you’ll need to learn to be considered
shark-jouzu (“jouzu” = じょうず = 上手 = literally, “above + hand” = means “skilled, good at”… makes
sense, right?)