Japanese Writing Systems

The Japanese written language is very different from the ABC’s that we are accustomed to. To start with, Japanese has three different writing systems: kanji, hiragana and katakana. There is also a system called Rōmaji for non-Japanese to write English approximations of Japanese words using the ABC’s (the Roman alphabet). Japanese is not written with spaces between words. There are no capital letters and no plurals. However, throughout this document you will often find blanks between words and English capitalization whenever it adds clarity.

The Japanese Writing Systems

You do not need to learn the various Japanese writing systems. It’s enough just to know they exist.

Kanji

Kanji	漢字	Chinese characters
Kan	漢	China
Ji	字	character or letter

In ancient times Japan had no writing system of its own. Around the 5th century AD Japan began to borrow the pictorial Chinese writing system called kanji. Interestingly, in those early times Japanese literature was first translated into Chinese and then written in kanji.

Kanji are ideograms. Each kanji has its own meaning and corresponds to a word. By combining kanji more words can be created.

There are over 50,000 different kanji. Fortunately, only 2,136 are considered necessary for everyday usage. Japanese school children are required to know the everyday kanji by the time they graduate from high school.

Hiragana

Unlike our ABC’s, hIragana is not an alphabet, but rather a syllabary. A word is “spelled” using one “letter” to represent a spoken sound. In Japanese, each syllable begins with a consonant and ends with a vowel.

n/m	w	r	y	m	h	n	t	s	k
ん	わ	ら	や	ま	は	な	た	さ	か	あ	a
		り		み	ひ	に	ち	し	き	い	i
		る	ゆ	む	ふ	ぬ	つ	す	く	う	u
		れ		め	へ	ね	て	せ	け	え	e
	を	ろ	よ	も	ほ	の	と	そ	こ	お	o

read from right to left

Katakana

Katakana is more or less a duplicate of hiragana, but more angular. Katakana is used to approximate the sound of English words. Your name on your promotion certificate and on your black belt, should you have one, is written in katakana. Since there are sounds in English not found in Japanese, there are a few katakana combinations not found in hiragana. Katakana is also used in Japanese advertising for its simple, eye-catching look.

n/m	w	r	y	m	h	n	t	s	k
ン	ワ	ラ	ヤ	マ	ハ	ナ	タ	サ	カ	ア	a
		リ		ミ	ヒ	ニ	チ	シ	キ	イ	i
		ル	ユ	ム	フ	ヌ	ツ	ス	ク	ウ	u
		れ		メ	ヘ	ネ	テ	セ	ケ	エ	e
	ヲ	ロ	ヨ	モ	ホ	ノ	ト	ソ	コ	オ	o

read from right to left

Rōmaji

Japanese can be written phonetically using the standard English alphabet, called the Roman alphabet. Japanese written using the Roman alphabet is called rōmaji. Rōmaji can only approximate the sounds of Japanese.

n/m	w	r	y	m	h	n	t	s	k
n	wa	ra	ya	ma	ha	na	ta	sa	ka	a	a
		ri		mi	hi	ni	chi	shi	ki	i	i
		ru	yu	mu	fu	nu	tsu	su	ku	u	u
		re		me	he	ne	te	se	ke	e	e
	wo	ro	yo	mo	ho	no	to	so	ko	o	o

read from right to left

There are 26 letters in the English alphabet. Of these, there are five vowels (aeiou) and twenty consonants. The letter y can act as either a vowel or a consonant.

Japanese has the same set of 5 vowels (aeiou), but y is always a consonant. There are only 14 consonants in Japanese (k, s, t, h, m, y, r, w, g, z, d, b, p and n) . Some Japanese to English dictionaries will order the entries in our standard “abc” order while others will use the “ksthmyrwn” order.

What happened to g, z, d, b and p in the above chart? We know those sounds exist because they are found in Kōburyū and many other words of karate. Some sounds are achieved through the addition of tiny markings like ” and ○ . For example, ha (は) can be read as ga (ば) or pa (ぱ). We are familiar with another example: the bu (ぶ) of Kōburyū.

kanji	孝武流
hiragana	こうぶりゅう
katakana	コウブリュウ
Romaji	Kōburyū

Kōburyū – An Example

Kōburyū is made up of three kanji: 孝武流 .

こうぶりゅう is a rendering in hiragana of the pronunciation of 孝武流 . Notice the use of ” to change the sound of fu (ふ) to bu (ぶ). Kōburyū also illustrates another complication of written Japanese. The smaller than normal symbol ゅ (versus ゆ) changes the pronunciation from “ru” to “ryu.” Fortunately, this is easily represented in Romaji by simply including the y.

There are several systems used to phonetically spell Japanese words using the Roman alphabet. I have chosen to use the Hepburn method because it is most likely to result in correct pronunciation by non-Japanese readers (though a pain because of the special characters, ō and ū, which can’t be typed). For example, the word “Kōburyū” is a phonetic rendering of the way the Japanese characters are pronounced using the Hepburn system. Some of you may remember Kōburyū spelled as Kouburyu – using a different system to write Japanese using the Roman alphabet – and poorly rendered, at that.

TMI?

Don’t worry. That’s pretty much it. It is interesting to note that Japan does not have spelling bees. If you can pronounce a word properly you can “spell” it in hiragana or katakana. No contest. However, there are kanji competitions where knowing the correct kanji and how to write the kanji with every stroke of the pen in the correct order and relationship to the other strokes is the challenge. The stroke order is so important that many on-line kanji learning apps have video of how to write the kanji strokes in order.

For fun, you can try to look up Japanese words in on-line dictionaries aimed at English users. Or use Google Translate to learn how to pronounce Japanese words. In either case, the Romaji must be entered correctly to get the right definition or a good pronunciation. One more complication.