Decoding Japanese Alphabets: A Guide to 3 Writing Systems

Coming from a western language, one might be inclined to call the Japanese writing system(s) an alphabet, but that is not correct. In this article we will go over the three writing systems used in Japanese and clear up all the misconceptions.

These three writing systems are hiragana, katakana, and kanji. The first two have a lot more in common, and are collectively called kana. Each system serves a specific purpose and is used in different contexts.

Another thing they have in common: if you want to learn Japanese, you'll be learning all of them.

Here we go:

Hiragana (the curly looking symbols)

Hiragana is a syllabary, meaning that each character represents a syllable, rather than a full word or individual sound. It is primarily used for native Japanese words, grammatical elements, and the inflection of verbs and adjectives.

It is often used in conjunction with kanji in written Japanese. For example, a sentence might use kanji for nouns and important content words, but hiragana for verb conjugations and particles.

Hiragana characters can be easily recognized due to their more rounded and cursive appearance as compared to kanji or katakana.

They look like this:

にほんご

Katakana (the sharp looking symbols)

Katakana is also a syllabary, which means that each character represents a syllable rather than a single consonant or vowel.

Both katakana and hiragana consist of the same number of basic characters, and they both represent the same set of sounds in the Japanese language.

The difference between the two lies in their usage. Katakana is primarily used for writing foreign words, technical and scientific terms, the names of non-Japanese people, and onomatopoeia.

Visually, katakana characters are angular and often simpler in form compared to hiragana.

They look like this:

ニホンゴ

Kanji (the complex, blocky looking symbols)

The final boss of the writing systems is kanji. Kanji are logographic characters used in the Japanese writing system, which were taken from Chinese. Unlike hiragana and katakana, which represent sounds, each kanji character represents a meaning.

Kanji can be used in isolation as standalone words, but can also combine with other kanji. Frequently, two characters combine to form a word to express a specific meaning.

While hiragana and katakana can be learned in days, mastering kanji takes years. This is because, whereas there are only tens of kana, there are thousands of kanji characters.

Each of the following blocks is a separate kanji:

日本語

Kanji are kind of like Emojis

To understand how and why kanji work this way, you can look at emoji's to grasp the concept. The English language already exists, and even if we replace some words by emoji's, we would still be able to understand the meaning. For example, if we change "The house is on fire" to "The house is on 🔥", you would still be able to pronounce the word and understand its meaning. We can also take our 🔥 "fire" and combine it with ⛰️ "mountain" to get 🔥⛰️ "fire mountain", also called "volcano." The exact same thing you see here also happens in Japanese. This is actually not too far off from how some words were borrowed from China. Instead of emojis, Japan borrowed the Chinese characters 火山 which mean fire and mountain individually.

Readings can be Tricky

The way a kanji is pronounced is called a reading, and the vast majority of kanji have multiple readings.

Making matters worse, readings are not always so predictable. When the above word for volcano was borrowed, the Japanese language already had their own words for fire and mountain, which were pronounced as /hi/ and /yama/, respectively. However, when forming the word volcano, 火山, the reading is not simply a merging of the two into /hiyama/, but actually /kazan/. The new word was borrowed from Chinese, and likewise, the pronunciation chosen also more closely reflects the pronunciation of the Chinese word at the time of its borrowing.

Because of this unpredictability of how a specific kanji is read in any specific word, so called furigana is sometimes used. Furigana are small hiragana characters that appear above kanji characters. These tell you how to pronounce the kanji in the specific context.

Furigana for our above example, would look like this: 火山(かざん)

But it is important to know that furigana is only used in children's material, when a kanji is rather rare and the reader can't be expected to know it, or in learners' material such as our Migaku Japanese Academy course. This means that over time, you will have to memorize how kanji are read in different situations. This may all sound daunting, but if you take it one word at a time, it is not as hard as it sounds.

How to learn hiragana and katakana

Hold up here:

Alright with that?

Here goes.

Migaku Japanese Fundamentals is a flashcard based course that is presented in A:B format:

Each kana is accompanied by a recording from a native speaker and a video of a native speaker pronouncing it.

How to learn kanji

The kana are pretty straightforward: there's only a few dozen of them, and each one is pronounced in a specific way. Drill them for a few weeks and you'll know them like the back of your elbow.

Kanji, however... kanji are a different beast.

After experimenting with thousands of students, we've decided that the most optimal way to teach kanji is as follows:

You'll first get a crash course in how kanji work. They're constructed in specific ways, and if you understand that logic, you'll be able to break down any kanji you see into meaningful parts.

From here, we give each of these "meaningful parts" a name, and then make a funny story out of those parts. The idea is that, so long as you build an obnoxious image of a huge monster cow that needs ten guns to take down, you'll also remember "ten" and "gun"—things that happen to be kanji components—and you can follow those breadcrumbs right back to the kanji for cow.

It's a simple system, but it works.

As you follow along, you'll learn all of the kanji that appear in our Japanese Vocabulary + Grammar course—and, before long, you'll have enough foundation under you that you can start doing cool things in Japanese.

The most important thing to remember if you want to learn Japanese

As you can see, Japanese is quite complex. There's a lot of apps and textbooks out there to learn it. It's easy to get analysis paralysis.

Whatever you end up doing, though, remember this:

That's it.

That's all it takes.

If you can do that, you'll learn Japanese.

Good luck, friend 🫡