Japanese Alphabets

Why Japanese has three different alphabets and how they are combined.

• Made in China

  Kanji are early Chinese characters imported into Japan in the fifth century. Japan, for instance, is written with two characters: 日本, 日 means sun and 本, base, so Japan means base of the sun or Land of the Rising Sun. It is pronounced as nee-hon.

• Male and female

  Two important characters - if only so you know which toilet door to use! - are for man 男 otoko and woman 女 onna. Keep an eye out for these or the slightly more polite combination of 男性 dansei, gentlemen, and 女性 josei, ladies.

• Radicals

  The character for woman 女 is one of the 214 basic characters in kanji. They are known as radicals and are used to form other characters. For example, 好 to like, is the combination of 女 and the character for child 子, reflecting traditional ideas about the unique love of a woman for a child. Or there's 安, peaceful, which is basically a woman under a roof. An interesting concept, some might argue!

• More than kanji

  Unlike modern Chinese, which uses around 6000 characters, for Japanese you only need about 2000. Japanese sentences combine kanji characters with hiragana and katakana. Hiragana are symbols which represent all the 46 syllables used in spoken Japanese. Kanji is used to convey the meaning while hiragana carries the grammar. Verbs in kanji, for instance, usually have hiragana endings.

• Spellings

  Hajimemashite, Pleased to meet you means literally It's the first time (that we meet). In the combined kanji and hiragana spelling it looks like this: 初 めまして - 初 is kanji for the idea of first, and めましてare hiragana characters for め: me ま: ma し: shi て: te.

  You can also write the same word using only hiragana: は: ha じ: ji め: me ま! : ma し shi て te.

• Coffee and karaoke

  Katakana, like hiragana, is a way of writing syllables, but is used, on the whole, for terms which have been incorporated into Japanese from other languages. Common examples are コーヒー kōhii, coffee or perhaps the most famous カラオケ karaoke from the Japanese kara, empty, and oke short for ōkesutora, orchestra.

• Last but not least

  Rōmaji literally means Roman letters and is basically identical to our writing system. It is very common to see Japanese place names, particularly on public transport, written in kanji with the hiragana pronunciation and the rōmaji version. So for example in Tokyo you might see the following sign 新宿　しんじゅく　Shinjuku with all three meaning the same destination. Luckily for westerner learners all Japanese words can be written in rōmaji.