Japanese writing systems

There’s 4 different writing system in Japanese.

Romaji

This is basically just latin alphabet applied to Japanese phonetic. It’s used to convey Japanese sounds to non-Japanese speakers/languages and those not familiar with the traditional Japanese writing systems.

Hiragana

Symbols like あいうえお,たちつてと, etc. This is the bread and butter of Japanese. You can spell every single word using this syllabary.

Katakana

Symbols like アイウエオ,タチツテト, etc. It is almost the same as hiragana, except it’s often used to spell foreign words or to give a bold/italics-like emphasis to Japanese words. You can compare it to WRITING IN ALL CAPS in English.

Kanji#

This is the Chinese logographic writing system that has been historically adpoted by Japanese centuries ago due to Chinese influence.

2020-08-29

Japanese
Kanji
- Japan, needing a writing system for itself, decided to adopt these symbols for its own literature (see: Japanese writing systems). A bunch of transformations happened to the language over the centuries and we ended up with hiragana and katakana as simplifications of man’yogana (phonetic kanji) and hentaigana.
漢語 (Chinese-origin) vs 和語 (Japanese-origin) word table
- Japanese takes a lot from Chinese in its origin, as the language was shaped on top of the kanji writing system (Japanese writing systems) in its history. However, on the other hand, the kanji writing system was also adapted on top of the already existing spoken Japanese language.
Full Timeline
Japanese Learning Resources
- Another textbook like Genki with a classroom-like lesson structure. It covers about the same topics as Genki, and personally it’s what I’ve used myself. I would recommend it over Genki as I found it to have a better format, but overall they are very similar. Get the kana version, don’t even bother with the romaji one(Japanese writing systems).