The reason for this, as already touched on, is because the purpose of kanji is meaning, not sound. Unlike Chinese, which is made entirely of kanji, a Japanese sentence will consist of kanji and hiragana put together. Instead, kanji convey meaning instead of sound. So they’re not quite the same as the phonetic hiragana and katakana. But the same kanji can be read in different ways. So by breaking down a kanji into its smaller parts, kanji can become less threatening and a lot more accessible. Who might you find carefully standing in the top of a tall tree watching what’s going on?Careful parents looking out for their kids, that’s who! The right side of the kanji contains 目me, which is “eye,” but with the little legs underneath, it becomes 見mi(ru), “to watch.” 立 ta(tsu), on the top left, means “to stand.” Underneath tatsu is 木 ki, which means “tree.” Sounds like maybe someone is standing in a tree so far! And they can all give us a hint about the meaning of the whole. 親 oya means “parents.” But looking closer, we can see that this one kanji is actually made up of many kanji. These are small, simpler kanji that have individual meanings and that you can put together to make a bigger word. But here's some good news – many kanji are made up of smaller pieces called radicals. Here it is, the “beast” of Asian languages: the big, multi-stroke characters Japanese is infamous for.Ĭomplex kanji like 親 might put you off. You might encounter katakana in words like “coffee,” which is ko-hi- in Japanese and looks like this in writing コーヒー.Īside from specific foreign words, you won’t find much use for katakana unless you’re making a couple unique sounds, like pika pika ピカピカ, which is the sound effect for something sparkling. That means that it’s the same 46 sounds, just with a different symbol. And you won’t need to use it unless you’re using a foreign word. The other good news is that katakana is just like hiragana: it makes the same sounds. Katakana is the “borrowed word” alphabet. So instead, they created a separate writing system that they specifically use for two things: words borrowed from other languages and special kinds of sounds. But they didn’t know how to make them into kanji. One problem that Japanese speakers ran into as the language developed was that they wanted to use words that came from other cultures. Use hiragana to spell out がんばる, and people will understand you just the same. Thankfully, you don’t need to use those kanji when you’re starting out. That’s a common word, but boy, look at those kanji! You might worry that Japanese seems like a big mess of complicated kanji think about 頑張る ( ganbaru, to try hard). With it, you can spell any Japanese word that there is, because Japanese is phonetic: its letters represent sounds, not ideas. That’s all! That’s the entire hiragana alphabet.

It helps to see it like this, in families: Each “piece” of Japanese (besides vowels and the sound n) is a consonant + vowel combo. (You may notice that Japanese doesn’t follow the AEIOU order of vowels-fun fact!)Īfter this, the entire language is broken into phonetic pieces. These characters each represent a sound, and in that sense, they are the letters that spell out Japanese words. Hiragana is the “primary” form of written Japanese you can’t put a sentence together without it. But how can you tell the difference between them? Hiragana Together, these three writing methods make up the entirety of the Japanese language. In Japanese, the “alphabet” is broken into three separate trees: hiragana, katakana, and kanji.

Japanese spelled with english alphabet