The Japanese language is made up of three alphabets, hiragana (which we will be focusing on), katakana and kanji. The Latin alphabet, romaji, is also often used in Japanese, especially for company names and logos, advertising, and when inputting Japanese into a computer.
Japanese texts can be written in two ways:
| 1) in Western style (i.e. in horizontal rows from the top to the bottom of the page) or 2) in traditional Japanese style (i.e. in vertical columns from the right to the left side of the page). |
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Here’s a bit about each alphabet:
The hiragana alphabet is made up of 46 characters, and is a rounded smooth style. It is phonetic (it sounds how it is written). Hiragana is learnt from the start of primary school using pictures that relate to the sound or shape of the character to help learn them. Hiragana is used to write native Japanese words. For example, the Japanese word for 'to do' (
su.ru) is written with two hiragana: 
(su) + 
(ru).
The katakana alphabet is very similar to hiragana, also made up of 46 characters and also phonetic. Its major difference from hiragana is that the characters have sharp edges and are not as rounded. Katakana is used for writing foreign words or new Japanese words. Katakana is generally used to write words borrowed from other languages and is onomatopoeic. For example, re.ta.su was borrowed from the English 'lettuce', and is written with three katakana:
(re) + 
(ta) + 
(su).
Kanji are complex picture characters used for names, nouns and stems of adjectives and verbs. Based on the Chinese alphabet, kanji compounds generally derive their meaning from the combined kanji. For example, Tokyo (
) is written with two kanji: 'east' (
) + 'capital' (
). The kanji, however, are pronounced differently than their Chinese relatives. For example, in Chinese, these two kanji would be 'Dongjing'. The name was chosen because Tokyo was to be the capital of Japan to the east of the previous capital, Kyoto (
).It is said that 50,000 kanji characters exist. After WW2, the Japanese government choose 1,945 basic characters as 'Jooyoo Kanji' (or commonly used kanji), which are used in textbooks and newspapers. In Japan, one learns about 1,000 basic characters from 'Jooyoo Kanji,' in primary and intermediate school. A lot of time is spent at school learning kanji.
Japanese is usually written in a combination of three alphabets though sentences can be written in either hiragana or katakana only. Learning the first 5 hiragana characters is a good start for learning to write Japanese.
As stated above, the hiragana alphabet is made up of 46 characters. The general rule for the way in which you write a character is left to right, top to bottom.
Below are the first five characters of the hiragana alphabet (
, 
, 
, 
and 
). Press the pink play button to see its stroke order and the green sound button to listen to how it is pronounced.After that practise writing your newly learnt hiragana with this practice sheet.
Download the practice sheet in .doc format here...
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Japanese: |
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| Japanese:
Pronunciation: 'ee' as in deep Strokes: 2 |
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Japanese:
Pronunciation: 'u' as in rude Strokes: 2 |
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| Japanese: Pronunciation: 'e' as in extra Strokes: 2 |
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| Japanese: Pronunciation: 'o' as in joke Strokes: 2 |
Click HERE to view links to other useful Japanese language websites.
