The Japanese writing system for beginners

What are hiragana, katakana and kanji for?

Each script has its own job. The two kana are sound scripts, one sign per syllable, and both cover the same basic sounds. Kanji are meaning scripts: each character carries a meaning and has one or more readings.

All three often meet in a single short sentence:

• ひなた, the name, and the particles は and を are hiragana.
• レシピ (recipe) and ノート (notebook) are English loanwords, so they are katakana. The bar in ノート makes the vowel long.
• 古い (old) and 開きました (opened) start with a kanji for the meaning and end in hiragana for the grammar. That hiragana tail is called okurigana.

Why is the particle は read wa?

Japan's rules for spelling with kana, the 現代仮名遣い (modern kana usage) set by cabinet notice in 1986, write words by their modern sounds, with a few exceptions kept from older spelling. The three you meet in your first sentence are particles:

All three examples are the ones the official rules themselves give. The same rules spell long vowels with an extra kana: おかあさん (mother) adds あ, おとうさん (father) adds う. Hepburn romaji, which this site uses, marks most long vowels with a line instead: otōsan, kyō.

What is katakana used for?

Mostly for words from other languages. Japan's official guide to writing loanwords, 外来語の表記 (1991), deals with writing loanwords and foreign place and personal names in katakana. Katakana also marks sound and feeling words, the way italics might in English:

Beginner stories lean on katakana more than harder ones, because familiar loanwords are an easy way in. In the free chapters of the Contos library, katakana makes up 8% of the characters at A1, 7% at A2, and 5–6% at B1 and B2.

How do kanji readings work?

Most kanji have two kinds of reading: an on reading, which came into Japanese with the character from Chinese, and a kun reading, which is a native Japanese word attached to it. The official jōyō table prints on readings in katakana and kun readings in hiragana. Here is one everyday kanji, 日 (day, sun), as the beginner stories use it:

Words like 今日 are listed in the jōyō table's appendix (付表) of words read as a whole. Several of them turn up in beginner stories: 二人 (futari, two people) is in 12 of the 48 free A1 and A2 chapters, 部屋 (heya, room) in 17, and 友達 (tomodachi, friend) and 昨日 (kinō, yesterday) appear too.

The jōyō list has 2,136 characters. It is a guide (目安) for kanji use in everyday writing such as laws, newspapers and broadcasting, not a limit, and it doesn't cover proper nouns apart from prefecture names. That is why names can use rare kanji or unusual readings: learn them as names. The free A1 chapters in Contos use 368 different kanji, names included; the most frequent ones outside names include 言, 何, 中, 見, 日, 人 and 来.

Why does Japanese have no spaces, and what are furigana and romaji?

Ordinary Japanese runs words together, and readers use the switch between scripts to see where words begin: a kanji after a run of hiragana often starts a new word. Learners don't have that instinct yet, so Contos stories put a space between words. Two other aids exist:

• Furigana are small kana printed beside or above kanji to show their reading, common in children's books and learner material. Contos stories have none; tap a word for its meaning instead.
• Romaji is Japanese in Latin letters, like the readings on this page. It helps with pronunciation at the start, but it hides the scripts you need to read. Contos stories have no romaji.

Japanese can also run in vertical columns, read top to bottom and right to left. Even the cabinet notices behind the jōyō list and the kana rules were issued in vertical text. On screens, as in Contos, horizontal lines from left to right are the norm.

In what order should you learn the scripts?

1. Hiragana first. It is about two thirds of every beginner text, and it carries all the grammar.
2. Katakana next. Same sounds, different shapes. Loanwords like ドア and コンビニ reward you at once, and the JLPT expects both kana even at its easiest level, N5.
3. Kanji through words, from your first story. Learn 手紙 (letter) as a word with its reading, not 手 and 紙 as abstract characters. For how many you need at each stage, see how many Japanese words and kanji you need.
4. Read daily to fix them. A short chapter a day keeps the kana fast and the kanji coming back; our first 100 Japanese words shows which ones you will see first.