Japanese Writing Zone

Take a slow, deep breath. Exhale, and imagine yourself standing in this green field looking upon Japan's most famous icon, Mt. Fuji. Do you feel relaxed? Good. Let's get started.

The Japanese language is a beautiful and complex language that requires one to approach it with a calm and positive attitude. For the record, Japanese shares no similarities with Chinese other than the writing system. Japanese actually shares more in common with Korean and, believe it or not, is said to be related to Turkish.

The Japanese language uses three distinct writing systems: kanji, hiragana, and katakana. This page and its subsequent lessons are here to teach you the last two systems. Kanji is the Japanese word for Chinese characters and is taught in the Chinese Writing Zone.

Hiragana and katakana are like the Japanese alphabets. Each group uses 48 simple characters that stand for vowels and consonant-vowel pairs. Hiragana can be used to write any Japanese word, meaning you essentially don't need kanji, but the reality is that hiragana is always paired with kanji as you will soon learn.

Katakana is the writing system used for borrowed words. Japanese employs many words borrowed from English and other European languages. Click here to begin Japanese Writing Lesson 1

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