[Beginners Japanese] Chapter 1: The Japanese Alphabet

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Unlike most germanic languages, Japanese has a set of two different alphabets, called the hiragana and the katakana. In addition to those alphabets, they also have a system of characters, originally derived from Chinese, which is called kanji. Finally, they have also incorporated the roman aplabet, in what they call Romaji. Here are some more detailed explanations of each alphabet:

Kanji:
The ancient characters adopted from the Chinese Hanzhi writing. They each convey an idea, and are used for nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. This collection of more than 7,000 characters usually has double meanings for each one, depending on the context and position in the sentence.

Hiragana:
Hiragana is a phonetic alphabet, used to present particles, verb inflextions (okurigana), explain the pronunciation of kanji (furigana), or words not written in Kanji.
Example of hiragana writing:
わたし wa-ta-shi, meaning I, me, myself, can be written like this in hiragana and would be grammatically correct. However, the kanji for wa-ta-shi is 私. This is one way you can use hiragana. Particles, verb inflextions and furigana will be explained in later lessons. For now, we will use hiragana to form kanji.

Katakana:
Another phonetic alphabet. Katakana is not used to write kanji, but instead is used to display foreign names or things that cannot be translated into hiragana or kanji. They are easy to seperate from hiragana because of their straight lines.
Example of katakana writing:
There is no word in Japanese for ice-cream, there is no kanji for it. Because it is a foreign and exotic word, it is not written in hiragana, but in katakana. Ice-cream becomes: アイスクリーム a-i-su-ku-rii-mu. A phonetic equivalent to Ice-cream in English, but in a way that Japanese people can pronounce it.

Romaji:
The romanization of Japanese. Romaji uses the roman alphabet to display kanji, hiragana or katakana. Though used frequently by non–japanese, it is highly innacurate because of the double meaning that one kanji can have.
Example of romaji writing:
In the examples for hiragana and katakana, we used the words “watashi” and “aisukuriimu”. Both of which are writtin with the standard latin alphabet that we use in many languages. It is similar to the standard pinyin system that is used for writing Chinese with roman letters. The biggest flaw about using romaji only, is that the context will be harder to grasp. With kanji, the meanings of words will fall into context with the rest of the word.

Download the Hiragana and Katakana Alphabets:

For your references and studying, I have compiled both alphabets in PDF files. PDF files are read with Adobe Acrobat Reader. Download them from our remote server:

Other lessons in this series: