Japanese Writing

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When learning Japanese you may be wondering where to start with understanding Japanese writing. To help you in this quest we have outlined the basics for you below.

If you truly want to learn to read and write in Japanese then the best course, which is all done online is "Kanji Supremecy". Feel free to check out their website for yourself if want here's the link: Japanese Writing Course (sponsored affiliate link)

To start with Japanese writing is made up of three different scripts (characters) these are as follows:

• Hiragana
• Katakana
• Kanji

All the above use characters that are made up of a series of strokes. The Japanese also use 'Romaji' which is a standard way of writing Japanese with the Latin alphabet (as we do in English).

Romaji makes learning Japanese a lot easier when starting out because you can read the Romaji and  understand the correct pronunciation before having to worry about learning all the Japanese characters.

For example the word for; 'Fish' is spelt 'Sakana' in romaji, and we recognise the letters and can pronounce the word. You can also write 'Sakana' with Japanese charatcers too.

Everyday Japanese literature such as a newspaper or magazine in Japan uses a combination of all three writing scripts.

Kanji is slightly different than the other two forms where the symbols that make up Kanji represent a thing, such as girl or hand, and the character can have a different meaning and pronunciation in different context.

Katakana and Hiragana characters are different from Kanji in that they represent syllables of words. For example in the table below the word for I is 'Wa-ta-shi' which is three syllables and has three corresponding characters for each syllable.

Character	Usage	Example
Kanji	Names/Nouns/Words that have their own meaning
Katakana	Used for words that don't have their own character, such as uncommon words or foreign words like television ot taxi
Hiragana	The symbols themsleves don't have their own meaning, yet are used to form words and can be used to change tense of other words and as particles and grammatical endings
Romanji	Romanji is where  Japanese words are written with Romanized letter that we use in English.	Television =  Terebi

The above table provides a basic example of Japanese writing. When learning Katakana it is important to realise that it is made up of 46 characters. 5 of these are vowels sounds, 40 are consonants combined with a vowel, eg. 'Ka' and there is also a character that is for a sound that is most like the English 'N'.

Similarly Hiragana also has 46 characters which have a counterpart in Katakana. Hiragana is the first text that is taught to children in Japan, and often when a text is written using a Kanji symbol the Hiragana is written above it.

Kanji is the most difficult of the three scripts. This is because each character can have more than one possible meaning. This can be confusing, however when read in context can make more sense.

There is also another difference with Japanese writing (sponsored affiliate link) compared to English, and this is the direction of the writing.

Traditional Japanese writing is vertical and that is called 'Tategaki'. Therefore when you read a script in Japanese you start at the top right hand corner and read downwards and end at the bottom left corner. However with modern Japanese writing they now follow the same method that Latin does and that is left to right and this is called 'Yokogaki'.

When you start learning Japanese writing we understand that it can be difficult as there are numerous differences to Latin based languages such as English.

If you want to really get the hang of Japanese writing then I recommend getting a copy of the Kanji Supremecy Course. This is one of the only courses that focuses on Japanese writing and it is well worth checking it.

You can check out the Kanji Supremacy website for yourself and see what you think by clicking this link: Japanese Writing Course (sponsored affiliate link)

All the best!!

Sayoonara