Reading · how the writing works
Three systems, one sentence.
Japanese uses three sets of characters at the same time, which sounds like three times the work and is not. Here is what each one does, where it came from, and why the mix is what lets you read a sentence with no spaces in it.
Japanese is written with three sets of characters: hiragana, katakana and kanji. You need all three, because a normal sentence uses all three at the same time.
The basic alphabet. 46 characters, one sound each. It writes Japanese words and all the small grammar bits that hold a sentence together.
A second alphabet. Same 46 sounds, different shapes. It is used for words borrowed from other languages: coffee, taxi, your name.
Chinese characters. Each one carries a meaning, not just a sound. They write the main words: nouns, and the core of verbs and adjectives.
That says “I drink coffee.”
Japanese does not put spaces between words, so the shapes do that job instead. The moment you know which system is which, you can see where one word stops and the next one starts.
Learn hiragana first, katakana second, and pick up kanji slowly as you learn words. That is the order the daily lessons follow.
Hiragana
Used for: Native Japanese words, all the grammatical endings and particles, and furigana - the small reading aids printed above kanji. If you only ever learn one script, learn this one.
Japan had no writing system of its own. From around the 5th century it borrowed Chinese characters, and by the 8th century scribes were using them purely for their sound, ignoring their meaning - a system called man’yōgana (万葉仮名), named after the Man’yōshū poetry anthology.
That worked, but it was punishing: a single Japanese syllable took a whole complex Chinese character. Over the 8th and 9th centuries those characters were smoothed down into fast, flowing cursive shapes. That cursive is hiragana - every character you learn is a worn-down Chinese one.
In the Heian court, formal writing in Chinese was considered men’s work, so hiragana became known as onnade - “women’s hand”. That turned out to be one of literature’s luckier accidents: Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji and Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book were both written in it, and they are among the earliest great works of Japanese prose.
One last twist: until 1900 several rival cursive forms existed for the same sound (hentaigana, 変体仮名). A school reform that year fixed one shape per sound - which is why you have 46 to learn today rather than several hundred.
Katakana
Used for: Loanwords and foreign names, onomatopoeia, the scientific names of plants and animals, and emphasis - roughly the job italics do in English.
Katakana comes from the same era as hiragana but from the opposite motive. Buddhist monks reading Chinese scriptures needed quick pronunciation notes in the margins, and they needed them fast.
So instead of smoothing a whole character into cursive, they took a single piece of one and used that. Kata (片) means “partial” - katakana is literally “partial kana”. ア is the left-hand side of 阿, イ comes from 伊, ウ from the top of 宇. The angular, clipped look is exactly what you would expect from shorthand jotted in a margin.
The division of labour has flipped once since. Before the Second World War, official documents and telegrams were written in kanji and katakana, with hiragana treated as the softer, informal script. Afterwards the two swapped roles, which is why pre-war documents look so strange to modern readers.
Kanji
Used for: The content words - nouns, and the stems of verbs and adjectives. Unlike kana, each character carries meaning, not just sound.
The name kanji (漢字) means “Han characters”: they are Chinese, borrowed from around the 5th century, arriving via the Korean peninsula. For centuries educated Japanese simply wrote in Classical Chinese, a practice called kanbun (漢文).
Bolting a Chinese script onto a completely unrelated language left a permanent complication, and it is the one that makes kanji hard. Most characters carry at least two kinds of reading: an on’yomi, a Japanese approximation of the original Chinese pronunciation, and a kun’yomi, the native Japanese word that already meant the same thing. 日 alone can be nichi, jitsu, hi or ka depending on the word it sits in.
After the Second World War the sprawl was cut back for everyday use. The current jōyō (常用, “regular use”) list holds 2,136 characters, taught across primary and secondary school. JLPT N5 asks for around 100 of them - the 109 in this course.