What's a Kanji?

Written Japanese uses three separate alphabets. Hey, come back! It's not that bad, don't worry. Two of the three are syllabic. They are called hiragana and katakana and consist of fairly simple characters used to represent syllables. Kanji, however, is more complicated / difficult / beautiful / fascinating. Read a bit further and choose your own adjective...

The first alphabet, hiragana, is used to represent actual Japanese words, such as "daigaku" (university). Here the syllables are da, i, ga and ku. Most syllables consist of either a vowel or a consonant and vowel. There is also the syllable n which can be used mid-word or at the end of a word, such as in "shinkansen" (bullet train): shi n ka n se n - that's right folks, six syllables.

da-i-ga-ku shi-n-ka-n-se-n rainen watashi wa nihon ni ikimasu Next year I am going to Japan.

A Note on Pronunciation

This site assumes familiarity with hiragana and, to a lesser extent, katakana. However, as there are a number of methods for transcribing Japanese into roman script, I thought I'd better mention a couple of things.

Where I've written ou or oo, these are both pronounced as a long o, like in grow, throw, know or buffalo. This is to retain the distinction between the Japanese (ou) and (oo) rather than just use o with a macron for each. Besides, I can't find the macron on this text editor.

Other syllables are transcribed using the Modified Hepburn method, i.e. is written as shi and not just si, is tsu and not tu, and so on. This includes the use of double consonants to represent sokuon (small tsu hiragana), as in kekkon or shippai.

kekkon - marriage shippai - failure