by Alicia Yamashita

Created on: January 09, 2010   Last Updated: January 10, 2010

The  most difficult part of learning Japanese is quite arguably the writing system. Unlike English, Japanese has two different alphabets: Hiragana and Katakana. These alphabets consist of the same sounds, it is just that each Japanese sound has two different symbols. Furthermore, the Japanese alphabet is not made up of both consonants and vowels like the English alphabet. Instead, each Japanese sound in the alphabet is a consonant followed by a vowel. Therefore, the alphabet has nearly 50 different characters in each Hiragana and Katakana.

These sounds in the alphabet don't even cover all of the sounds that the Japanese language has, however, so added to the alphabet are combinations of a letter with a miniaturized letter (ie; ka + yo = kyo) and diacritics which change the consonant part of a sound to a new sound (ie; "ka" would be changed to "ga" with the use of the dakuten mark which looks similar to a quotation mark.) This adds the nearly 60 voiced sounds of the Japanese alphabet.

This may be very difficult for a non-native Japanese speaker because those are a vast amount of characters to memorize. On top of that, however are the approximately 2,000 borrowed Chinese characters known as Kanji. These characters are used in place of Hiragana or Katakana characters sometimes because Japanese has many words that have the same sounds. This is similar to the way the English language has the three words "there," they're," and "their." But unlike English, the words in Japanese would all have the same spelling with the Hiragana or Katakana alphabets. The Kanji characters help to distinguish the different meanings of the similar sounding words.

It may seem overwhelming to think of learning 2,000 different characters besides the two long alphabets in Japanese and that is why the Japanese learn these characters throughout their years in school.

If you are considering learning Japanese and are worried about delving into the Japanese reading and writing system, it is probably best to start by memorizing the Japanese alphabet, Hiragana. This is the most commonly used alphabet and, once you have this memorized, it will probably not be too hard to memorize the second, Katakana. These characters are simpler than their Hiragana counterparts and some of them even closely resemble the Hiragana letters. The Katakan alphabet is generally used to spell out words that have been borrowed from English or another language. For example, "ice" would be spelled with the Katakana characters that represent the sounds in "aisu." Flash cards, although very cliché, are extremely helpful for learning the symbols.

Once you have mastered the two alphabets, you may be ready to dive into the Kanji. You might choose to learn them in the order that the Japanese would, year level by year level. Or you might just choose to study them at your own pace in the order that you wish. Either way, you'll soon discover that most Kanji are just the first several Kanji mixed together into a new single Kanji. It will take a long time and it will be challenging but the reward will be knowing how to read and write the aesthetic language that is Japanese.

Learn more about this author, Alicia Yamashita.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.