Today's lesson is about the characters.
日本語の文字

Japanese characters

We will study three things here

1. Character type
2. Number of characters
3. How to write letters

First is the type of character

There are 3 letters in Japanese, Hiragana, katakana and kanji.

Let’s write Japan in hiragana and katakana kanji.

First is hiragana

Next is katakana

And kanji

Hiragana and katakana represent sounds.

Each character has no meaning.

Katakana is mainly used for words from foreign countries such as coffee and personal computers.

Kanji has a meaning.

Take a look at this kanji, for example. “木”

This is read as “ki”

And it has the meaning of “tree”.

This kanji is read as “Tsuki”

The meaning is “Moon”

In other words, you can guess the meaning of the word by looking at the kanji.

Hiragana and Katakana have only one sound.

However, there are more than one way to read Kanji.

For example, “木（ki）” can be read as “moku” or “me”.

“月（Moon）” is also read as “gatsu” or “getsu”.

And in Japanese, when writing sentences, we use hiragana, katakana and kanji together.

Let’s see this sentence for example.

“Mr. Yamada bought a personal computer last week.”

There are hiragana, katakana and kanji.