2. Katakana (and a handy Katakana chart)
Conveniently, the katakana character set covers the same sounds as hiragana. Some of the characters even look a bit similar, like ‘mo’ – も and モ – and ‘ya’ – や and ヤ.
Fun fact: to say ‘two’ in Japanese, we say ‘ni’. The number is typically written using the kanji ‘ニ’ which you may notice is the same as the katakana character for ‘ni’. So now you know one way to say and write ‘two’ in Japanese, your first of the Japanese numbers!
But wait, there’s more: Dakuten, handakuten and beyond
Maybe you’ve noticed that there seem to be some sounds missing from these katakana and hiragana charts that you know are used in Japanese. After all, how do you get gyoza and Pikachu without gyo, za, pi, or chu?
To make these sounds, you don’t need to learn more characters, but you do need to know about modifying and combining them. Here’s how modifications look:
And for combinations, we use smaller versions of the y-vowels ya (や), yu (ゆ), and yo (よ) to make new sounds, like sha (しゃ), chu (ちゅ), nyu (にゅ), and gyo (ぎょ). So spelling out gyoza in hiragana is actually a great example of both modifications and combinations in action – ぎょうざ.
And with that, you have all of the primary sounds made in Japanese! There are other little things like long vowels and hard stops, but those you can save for when you’ve learned a bit more.
Which brings us to the last of the three Japanese writing systems: kanji.
3. Kanji
The first thing you need to know is that, unlike katakana and hiragana, kanji aren’t always characters you put together to make sounds and words. A single kanji can be one word.
Kanji are symbols that mean a whole word or idea. Many of them were borrowed from Chinese characters at different times over the past several centuries, so if you read and write Mandarin Chinese, you’ll have a leg up!
Worth noting: Hiragana and katakana are frequently used to tell you what a kanji says, or how to pronounce it. For example, you might see these characters on menus, or even in episode titles for TV shows. This serves a double purpose: it can help foreigners and Japanese people alike, because there are many more kanji than most people – even Japanese people – ever learn.We won’t be able to teach you kanji with a handy chart – after all, there are over 6,000 kanji! But learning 1000 kanji will let you read about 95% of written Japanese materials.
And, fortunately, we can learn kanji, too, using images to help us. Take a look:
