Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji Explained

Open any Japanese book, sign or subtitle and you'll see three kinds of characters side by side. Here's a short sentence that uses all of them:

私わたしはアニメが好すきです。

• 私わたし and 好す are kanji: characters borrowed from Chinese that carry meaning.
• アニメ is written in katakana, the script for words from other languages.
• Everything else, は, が, き and です, is hiragana: the sounds that hold the sentence together.

Each script has its own job. Once you know what each one is for, Japanese text stops looking like a wall of symbols and starts looking like something you can take apart.

Hiragana: the glue

Hiragana is a set of 46 basic characters. Each one stands for a sound, usually a consonant and a vowel: か is ka, き is ki, く is ku. There's nothing to memorize beyond the sound, and with those 46 you can write any word in Japanese.

You'll see hiragana doing three jobs:

1. Grammar. Particles such as は, が and を mark who's doing what, and they're always written in hiragana.
2. Word endings. Verbs and adjectives keep their meaning in a kanji and change their ending in hiragana. 食たべる is "to eat", 食たべた is "ate" and 食たべない is "don't eat": the kanji stays the same and the hiragana after it changes.
3. Words without everyday kanji, like ありがとう (thank you) and これ (this).

ありがとうございます。

Written entirely in hiragana.

Katakana: words from abroad

Katakana has the same sounds as hiragana, written in sharper, straighter strokes. か in hiragana is カ in katakana, and both are read ka.

Japanese uses katakana for:

• Loanwords, mostly from English: コーヒー (coffee), テレビ (TV), アニメ (anime).
• Foreign names and places: アメリカ (America).
• Sound effects and emphasis, all over manga: ドキドキ is a pounding heart.

コーヒーを飲のみます。

Katakana for the loanword, a kanji for the verb's meaning and hiragana for the rest.

Katakana words are often English in disguise, so once you can read them you'll find you already know a lot of vocabulary.

Kanji: the meaning

Kanji came to Japan from China, and each one stands for an idea rather than a sound. 山やま is a mountain, 火ひ is fire, and together they make 火山かざん, a volcano.

Two things make kanji the long part of learning Japanese:

• There are a lot of them. The official list of kanji in everyday use (the jōyō kanji) has 2,136.
• Most have more than one reading. 山 is read yama on its own, but san in 富士山ふじさん, Mount Fuji. Which reading to use depends on the word, which is why it's easier to learn kanji through the words they appear in than one by one.

So why not write everything in kana? Kanji make text faster to read. Japanese doesn't put spaces between words, so the kanji show where words begin and what they mean at a glance.

日本にほんのアニメが大好だいすきです。

What to learn first

1. Hiragana, first. It's in every sentence, and it takes most people one to two weeks.
2. Katakana next. It's the same sounds again, so it goes faster.
3. Kanji gradually, alongside vocabulary, for as long as you study. Nobody learns them all before they start reading. Furigana are there to help in the meantime.

Momiji has decks for all three scripts, with stroke order for the kanji and spaced repetition that brings each character back just before you'd forget it.