Learning to Read and Write the Japanese Language

Japan may be a small country, but it is a global superpower and home to many huge manufacturing companies such as Toyota, Canon and Sony.

Learning to read and write the Japanese language is a time consuming task. Japanese has three writing systems. The three different systems are used simultaneously, and sometimes in the same sentence. Anyone aiming for fluency in reading and writing Japanese would have to master all three writing systems.

The first two writing systems are Katakana and Hiragana. Both of these have a number of basic characters that represent the syllables in the Japanese spoken language. Japanese words can be written in either Katakana or Hirigana, and they will be pronounced identically. The final Japanese writing system are the Kanji characters - these are based on Chinese characters and are very challenging to learn.

These are futuristic looking characters that represent syllables of the Japanese language. There are 46 basic Katakana symbols, so learning them is not a huge task. Fortunately they are not complex characters, so it is not difficult to learn how to write them either.

Katakana characters are normally used for more modern words such as those used to represent modern items such as televisions and electrical equipment. They are also used to represent words borrowed from other languages - the so called "loan words".

Japanese Hiragama for Beginners is my favourite book for learning Katakana. It has a good system for learning the characters, plus a set of Flash Cards that can be used to aid character recognition.

Hiragana are more rounded characters, but like Katakana they represent the syllables of the Japanese language. As with Katakana, there are 46 basic symbols. Hiragana based words are used for certain grammatical parts of the Japanese language. They are also used where there is no Kanji character for a word (although as previously mentioned Katakana is used for modern or loan words).

The third component of the Japanese language writing system are Kanji characters. These are similar to (and in most cases) identical to the Chinese Hanzi characters that are used in written Chinese. Learning the Kanji characters is by far the most difficult barrier to becoming proficient in reading and writing the Japanese language. There are many thousands of characters that must be memorised in order to learn the language. A knowledge of about 2000 characters is generally regarded as the minimum necessary to read most Japanese text. Japanese school children have to spend many hours memorising the characters, and repeatedly writing them down until they have committed them to memory. As adults we usually do not have the luxury of so much time available for learning. Thankfully there are a few different systems for speeding up the process of learning Kanji characters.

The best method I have found for learning Kanji characters is through the use of Flash Cards. These small cards have a single Kanji character on one side, and the details of its meaning, pronunciation and other information on the reverse. Flash Cards make it straightforward to self test your knowledge of Kanji characters.

The Tuttle Kanji Cards are considered by many language students to be the best Kanji Flash Cards available. Flash Cards are also available for learning Chinese Hanzi characters.

An innovative system for learning Kanji is the Heisig Method as described in the popular book Remembering the Kanji (there's also a book for learning Chinese hanzi characters with the Heisig method). Most systems for learning Kanji teach the characters in the frequency order in which they appear in typical Japanese text. The Heisig method differs from this in that it attempts to show how the various different characters relate to one another. The system is widely recognised as being invaluable for rapidly learning Kanji characters, but many people language learners find the method difficult to follow.