#Japanese letters full#
If you wanted to change that to the past tense, "mita"/saw, you’d leave the kanji as is and replace the る with the hiragana た (ta) to get 見た/"mita," which means “saw.”īut wait, if anything that can be written in kanji can also be written in hiragana, why not use only hiragana? After all, while the complete set of 46 hiragana is bigger than the 26-letter English alphabet, it’s still way more manageable than the 2,000 or so regular-use kanji, the collected group that serves as the litmus test for full adult Japanese literacy.Īctually, there are three pretty solid arguments against writing exclusively in hiragana.īecause kanji were developed before hiragana, writing with kanji generally imparts a more educated and mature feeling. So when writing a verb, you use a kanji for the base concept, then hiragana to alter the pronunciation and add more meaning, such as the tense.įor instance, the verb "miru," meaning “see,” is written 見る, combining the kanji 見 (read mi) with the hiragana る (ru). Remember, each kanji represents a concept. So why do sentences have a mixture of kanji and hiragana? Because hiragana gets used for grammatical particles and modifiers. "Kuruma," which we saw written in kanji as 車, can also be written in hiragana as くるま, with those three hiragana correlating to the sounds ku, ru, and ma. They just represent sounds.īecause of this, any Japanese word that can be written in kanji can also be written in hiragana. In other words, hiragana characters function like English letters, in that they don’t have any intrinsic meaning. They take fewer strokes to write than all but the simplest kanji, and instead of representing concepts, hiragana are used for writing phonetically. Hiragana, though, are much simpler in both form and function. For example, "kuruma," the Japanese word for “car,” is written in kanji as 車. There’s actually a fairly logical, slightly lengthy explanation for using all three, so pour yourself a cup of green tea and let’s dive right in.įirst, let’s take a look at kanji, which are complex characters, originally coming from Chinese, that represent a concept. The reason for this triple threat to language learners’ sanity isn’t that teachers of Japanese want to lessen their workload by convincing you to study Spanish instead.
That first rendering of “Tokyo” is in kanji, with the hiragana version next, and the katakana one at the bottom. Japanese has three completely separate sets of characters, called kanji, hiragana, and katakana, that are used in reading and writing.
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