Kana vs. Kanji

Written Japanese is made up of three different scripts: kanji, hiragana and katakana. The latter two scripts can be grouped together as kana. This article offers a brief introduction to the difference between the two kana scripts and kanji, and offers some examples of when each of the scripts is used.

Kana

Hiragana and katakana are grouped together as ‘kana’ and are mirror scripts: two different sets of characters that represent the same phonetic sounds.

Each kana character represents one phonetic syllable of the Japanese language and all characters except for ん (n) end in a vowel sound. While the sounds of the kana are mirrored across the scripts, the uses of the two scripts are very different.

Hiragana is used to write okurigana, suffixes to kanji (for example べる in 食べる) that change the grammar of a sentence. Hiragana is also used for words and elements such as auxiliary verbs and particles and to write native words that are not usually written in kanji. Another common use of hiragana is for furigana, which demonstrates the pronunciation of kanji.

Meanwhile, the more angular-shaped Katakana characters are used primarily to write foreign loanwords, non-Japanese proper nouns, Japanese company names and to emphasise certain words in advertisements, magazines, manga etc.

You may see both scripts (but usually hiragana) written in superscript above kanji. This is called furigana 振り仮名 and is used to illuminate the reading of difficult kanji. Talking of kanji...

Kanji

Kanji are the adopted Chinese characters that are used in the Japanese writing system. There are approximately 50,000 Japanese kanji in existence, but the number of kanji in regular use numbers between 2,000-3,000.

These characters are historically Chinese, but many have been altered in the millennia since their adoption. Many kanji have both a Chinese reading (onyomi 音読み - based on the original Chinese sound) and a Japanese reading (kunyomi 訓読み - based on the pronunciation of the Japanese word).

Which reading is used is dependent on context, whether the kanji is part of a compound of two or more kanji, whether it is an independent kanji, and its position in a sentence. For kanji where the use is ambiguous, furigana is often displayed above the kanji to inform the reader of the correct pronunciation.

Kanji are most commonly sorted and grouped by their primary radicals and then by the number of strokes needed to draw the kanji. For example, the kanji character 桜, meaning "cherry", is sorted as a ten-stroke character under the four-stroke radical 木 meaning "tree".