Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji: Why Japanese Uses Three Scripts

Here's an ordinary Japanese sentence, the kind you'd find in the first chapters of a textbook.

私は毎朝コンビニでコーヒーを買います。

わたしは まいあさ コンビニで コーヒーを かいます (watashi wa maiasa konbini de koohii o kaimasu)
I buy coffee at the convenience store every morning.

It's short, and it changes script eight times. To the person writing it, that's as unremarkable as an English sentence having capital letters and a full stop. Each script has its own job, the jobs rarely overlap, and once you can see which is which, a line of Japanese stops looking like a wall of symbols.

The sentence, piece by piece

Almost everything you'll read follows the same division. Kanji carry the meaning of the main words, hiragana carries the grammar around them, and katakana flags words that came in from other languages.

Hiragana: the grammar and the glue

Hiragana has 46 basic characters. Each one stands for a whole syllable, such as か (ka) or の (no), with ん (n) as the only bare consonant. Two small marks and a few combinations extend the set to cover every sound in the language, so anything that can be said in Japanese can be written in hiragana alone.

In normal text it does the grammatical work: particles like は, を and に, the endings of verbs and adjectives (the べます in 食べます), and small common words that are rarely written in kanji these days, such as これ (kore, this), する (suru, to do) and ありがとう (arigatou, thank you). It's also what furigana is written in, the tiny reading aids printed above or beside difficult kanji.

Every learner starts here. Our hiragana guide has the full chart.

Katakana: borrowed words and a few other jobs

Katakana is a second set of 46 characters for exactly the same sounds. か and カ are both "ka". The shapes are more angular, and what differs is where they're used.

• Loanwords. テレビ (terebi, TV), パン (pan, bread, from Portuguese), アルバイト (arubaito, a part-time job, from the German Arbeit).
• Foreign names and places. ロンドン (Rondon, London), マリア (Maria).
• Sound effects. ドキドキ (dokidoki, a pounding heart) and ワンワン (wanwan, a dog barking) are often written this way, especially in manga.
• Emphasis. A word that would normally be in hiragana or kanji gets put in katakana to make it stand out, a bit like italics.
• Plants and animals. In scientific and technical writing, species names go in katakana, so a biology textbook has ネコ where a novel has 猫 (neko, cat).

Our katakana guide covers that chart.

Kanji: the words themselves

Kanji are the characters borrowed from Chinese, and unlike kana, each one carries meaning. They're used for most nouns, the stems of verbs and adjectives, and names. The jouyou kanji list, the set taught in school and used in newspapers and official writing, has 2,136 of them, and most have more than one reading depending on the word they're in.

Both kana sets grew out of kanji, in around the 9th century. Hiragana came from whole characters written in fast cursive, and katakana from fragments of characters that Buddhist monks used as reading notes in Chinese texts. か and カ both descend from the kanji 加. か is the whole character written loosely, and カ is its left half.

How many you need depends on what you want to read, which we get into in how many kanji you need.

Why not drop kanji and write everything in kana?

It's a fair thing to wonder at around your fiftieth kanji. Kana can spell any word, so two thousand extra characters look like pure overhead. Here's the opening sentence again in hiragana only.

わたしはまいあさこんびにでこーひーをかいます。

Japanese is written without spaces. In the mixed version, every switch from kanji to hiragana and back shows you where a word starts. Take that away and you have to find the word boundaries yourself, syllable by syllable. Books for small children are written in hiragana, and they add spaces between phrases for exactly this reason.

The second problem is homophones. Japanese has a small set of sounds, so a lot of words are pronounced alike. はし can be 橋 (bridge), 箸 (chopsticks) or 端 (edge). かみ can be 紙 (paper), 髪 (hair) or 神 (god). In speech, pitch and context sort them out. On the page, kanji does it at a glance. The classroom demonstration is this sentence.

貴社の記者が汽車で帰社した。

きしゃの きしゃが きしゃで きしゃした
Your company's reporter went back to the office by train.

That's four different words, all pronounced きしゃ. Nobody talks like that, but milder versions of the problem turn up in every newspaper article.

Kanji is also compact, and once you know the characters, skimming a page for meaning is fast. There have been serious proposals to cut kanji back or abolish it, most recently after the Second World War. What came out of that period was a limit: an official list of 1,850 characters in 1946, replaced in 1981 by the jouyou list, which was expanded to today's 2,136 in 2010. Many characters were simplified along the way. The system itself stayed.

Where romaji fits

Romaji is Japanese written in the Latin alphabet: konnichiwa, Tokyo, sushi. In Japan you'll see it on station signs, passports and company logos, and in abbreviations like JR and NHK. It's also how most people type on a computer. You enter k-a-n-j-i on the keyboard, the software turns it into かんじ, and then it offers 漢字 as a conversion.

What romaji isn't used for is writing sentences. No book, menu or text message is in romaji. For learners it's a crutch for the first week or two and a hindrance after that, because it blurs details that kana shows clearly. おばさん (obasan) is an aunt and おばあさん (obaasan) is a grandmother, and in careless romaji they often come out the same.

Add the Arabic numerals 1, 2, 3, which are used for most numbers, and a typical page of Japanese mixes five kinds of character.

Words that mix scripts

The division of labour isn't perfectly neat. A single word can use two or three scripts. 消しゴム (けしゴム, keshigomu, an eraser) has one kanji, one hiragana and two katakana. 歯ブラシ (はブラシ, haburashi, a toothbrush) is kanji plus katakana.

Writers have some freedom, too. "Cat" can be 猫, ねこ or ネコ. かわいい (kawaii, cute) has a kanji spelling, 可愛い, that some people use and many don't. Hiragana tends to feel soft, katakana sharp or modern, and kanji formal, and advertising and manga play on those associations constantly.

What order to learn them in

1. Hiragana first. With daily practice, most people can read all 46 within a week or two. As soon as you can, stop using romaji.
2. Katakana straight after. The sounds are the same, so the chart goes faster. It usually takes longer to feel comfortable, because you see katakana less often.
3. Kanji from then on. Learn a few at a time alongside vocabulary and grammar, and don't wait until your grammar feels ready. Japanese children spread their first 1,026 kanji over six years of elementary school. Adults can go faster than that, but it's a long project either way.

Romaji doesn't need studying. If you're reading this, you already know it.

Common questions