The Japanese Writing System

Japan did not originally have a writing system. Around 400 AD, Chinese characters made their way to Japan, and officials began using them to write Japanese. These characters are called kanji.

But there was a fundamental problem: Japanese and Chinese are completely different languages. Imagine trying to write English using Chinese characters. Simple sentences like "I like ramen" work fine -- just find the character for each word. But what about words like "the" that have no Chinese equivalent? Or past tenses like "bought" that require two Chinese characters to express one English word?

The same mismatch happened with Japanese, only much worse. The early system was so complex that only the wealthy and powerful could afford the years of training needed to learn it.

Here is where the story gets interesting. Japanese culture at the time believed that women were not capable of learning such a complex system. But these women wanted to write. So they began doing something extraordinary.

Instead of using Chinese characters for their meanings, they chose characters purely for their sounds. For example, the Japanese word for "sky" is sora. Rather than writing the single Chinese character that means "sky," they would pick one character pronounced "so" and another pronounced "ra" -- completely ignoring what those characters originally meant in Chinese.

It was exactly the same breakthrough that happened with Egyptian hieroglyphics. Scholars struggled for years to understand the system, until they realized the pictures were not representing things -- they were representing sounds.

Over time, these sound-based characters were simplified into a set of around 46 clean symbols. This became hiragana -- a syllabary where each character represents one syllable. It is elegant, logical, and learnable.

Hiragana has a counterpart called katakana. There is exactly one katakana character for every hiragana one. Think of it like the difference between lowercase and uppercase letters in English -- two ways to write the same sounds.

Katakana is used primarily for words borrowed from foreign languages. When Japanese adopted words like "computer" (konpyuutaa) or "coffee" (koohii), katakana is the script used to write them. It signals to the reader that the word has foreign origins.

If Japanese only used hiragana and katakana (collectively called kana), it would be one of the simplest writing systems in the world. But when the kana scripts were invented, kanji did not disappear. Chinese characters were associated with wealth, power, and education, so the elite continued writing extensively in kanji for centuries.

After World War II, Japan standardized a set of about 2,000 characters called the jouyou kanji ("daily use kanji"). These are the kanji you need to know to be literate in modern Japanese. Everything beyond that set can be written in hiragana.

While 2,000 characters sounds daunting, keep in mind that Japanese children learn them gradually over years of schooling -- and they already speak the language fluently before they start. As an adult learner, you have the advantage of structured study methods and tools that did not exist before.

In a typical Japanese sentence, you will see all three scripts used simultaneously:

• Kanji -- for content words (nouns, verb stems, adjective stems)
• Hiragana -- for grammar (verb endings, particles, connecting words)
• Katakana -- for foreign loanwords, emphasis, and onomatopoeia

Far from being a weakness, this combination actually makes reading faster. Kanji act as visual anchors in a sentence, letting experienced readers scan quickly for meaning -- similar to how bolded keywords help you skim an English paragraph.

Start with hiragana. It is the foundation of everything else in Japanese. Once you know hiragana, you can write any Japanese word phonetically. From there, katakana comes naturally since it maps one-to-one with hiragana.

Then, as you build vocabulary and grammar, you can begin learning kanji in context -- which is exactly how Japanese children do it, and exactly how Kaeru is designed to guide you.