Japanese Writing Systems

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Top, left to right: handwritten hiragana, handwritten katakana, color-coded stoke order chart. Bottom, left to right: printed hiragana, printed katakana, romaji. Each image links to a full page chart (except romaji). Romaji is the standard way Japanese characters are pronounced in English. (Some romaji you may already be familiar with: karaoke, tsunami, samurai, ninja, sumo, kamikaze, judo, haiku, zen, shinto, wabisabi, kimono, futon, ramen, tofu, sushi, sashimi, teriyaki.) If you are learning to write beautiful characters, the top three charts in the handwritten style will be most useful to you.

Japanese can be read from the right side of the page to the left, along lines read from the top to the bottom of a column of script (as intended here), or it can be read in the same way as English: from the top of a page to the bottom, along lines read from the left to right side of a column. The 46 main characters in hiragana, and the 46 main characters in katakana, are composed of anywhere between one and four brush strokes that are usually made from top to bottom, and left to right, but not always. (See the chart above indicating the correct stroke order.)

Japan originally had no writing system of its own. Written Japanese evolved when Chinese characters, or kanji, were simplified and used to represent Japanese syllables, with no regard for their original meanings. This resulted in the character types of hiragana and katakana. Hiragana, the most common type, is used for words of Japanese origin. Katakana is used primarily for words borrowed from other languages. With the creation of both of these syllabic alphabets one might think there would no longer be any need for kanji in Japanese, but it is frequently used to supplement the other two.

While you may learn to recognize and write all the hiragana or katakana characters in a few weeks, it will take considerably longer to become proficient with kanji, for which a basic vocabulary consists of roughly one thousand characters. Fortunately, if all you want to do is be able to hold a simple conversation in Japanese, you don't need to learn to read or write kanji, most common words are written in hiragana. (It may help to superimpose a grid of dotted lines over the characters so that the spatial arrangement of their parts is more clearly seen.) But don't focus on perfect writing at the expense of learning to write and speak words and sentences in Japanese, which is more important.

This site is intended to help you recognize and memorize the appearance of Japanese characters, along with a few simple words and expressions. Other resources (websites, books, classes, etc.) are available that do a much better job of teaching correct pronunciation, and providing other information that an aspiring speaker and writer of Japanese will find very useful.

More hiragana Does your browser allow you to view Japanese fonts? If yes, then go here! If you have the right font, these characters should look like the handwritten hiragana at the top of this page.