For those of you who are completely new to the Japanese language, this post might be interesting to you.  The Japanese language consists of three different writing systems.  Learning all three writing systems is one of the challenges that Japanese learners face. 

Let’s start with the most common writing system, the hiragana (ひらがな).  Hiragana (ひらがな) letters are used to express native Japanese words.  The hiragana (ひらがな) consist of letters that represent different syllables.  For example, this letter あ is used to represent the sound ‘a’ as in the ‘a’ in the English word ‘aunt.’ 

The second writing system is the katakana (かたかな).  The katakana (かたかな) is used to express foreign words and is also syllable based.  For example, ア is used to express the sound ‘a’ as in ‘aunt.’  Interestingly enough, the word for ‘China’ in Japanese is expressed in hiragana (ひらがな) while the word for ‘America’ is expressed in katakana (かたかな).  Although both words are the name of countries, the word for China has been active in the Japanese language since olden days.  Japan’s contact with the U.S. is relatively recent, especially when you compare it with Japan’s contact with China.  As a result, the word for America is considered a loan word in Japanese.

Also, you might see this symbol ー when you’re reading katakana (かたかな) letters.  That dash is not part of the katakana (かたかな) alphabet.  That dash is more like a notation to indicate that the vowel is prolonged.  For example, the word for cake in Japanese is keeki (ケーキ).  Notice the dash after the character ke (ケ) .  Whenever you see the dash after a character, the character before the dash is the vowel that is elongated.  So instead of pronouncing this word as keki (ケキ) it is pronounced as keeki (ケーキ).  In this case the ‘e’ vowel is prolonged.

Both the hiragana (ひらがな) and the katakana (かたかな) have characters with diacritical marks.  For example the character ka (か) becomes a ga (が) with the symbol that looks like a quotation mark ”.  Similarly, when the character ha (は) has a diacritical mark that looks like a small circle, it will turn into pa (ぱ).  The diacritical marks indicate that unvoiced consonants such as k and h will turn into g and p respectively.

Lastly, let’s get to the third writing system, the kanji (かんじ).  The kanji (かんじ) is used to express nouns and adjectives.  It’s primarily used to express the meaning of words rather than express the sounds of words.  For example, with a pictorial symbol such as this: 日 the reader would understand that the Japanese word for ‘day’ is being expressed without having to write the actual sounds for the word ‘day’ in Japanese.  Kinda cool huh?  The kanji (かんじ) is useful when you have to read and decipher a long sentence in Japanese.  Sometimes there is no space between words and the kanji (かんじ) can help to clarify and break up the sentence into understandable chunks.

The Japanese writing system is learnable.  Even though it may seem complicated at first, practicing will give you an intuitive feel for the language and help you to gain fluency.  So practice, practice, practice everyone!