Mastering hiragana, katakana, and kanji is essential when studying Japanese. The Hiragana character represents sounds, while the Katakana character represents borrowed words or abbreviations. With kanji, meaning is conveyed with just one letter instead of a single syllable due to the context in which they are used.
There are tens of thousands of kanji characters in the Japanese language. So, this often poses a serious threat to new learners as they try to master these characters. But you don’t need to learn all the kanji characters. Basically, the number of kanjis you need to know depends on what you want to do with Japanese.
If you just want to speak Japanese without writing or reading it, you don’t need to learn any kanji. However, your understanding of Japanese will be greatly limited. To read around 95% of things written in Japanese, you should learn around 1,000 commonly used kanjis. To learn Japanese to a literate level, you need to master the 2,136 joyo kanji mandated by the Japanese government for determining literacy. With joyo kanji, you will be able to ready almost 99% of everything written in Japanese. This means you can read most Japanese novels, newspapers, manuals, etc.
To read, write and comprehend Japanese like a university-educated individual, you must learn about 3,000 kanji characters. However, an excellently educated and technical person will need as many as 5,000 kanji characters. You will need around 6,355 kanjis if you would like to pass the Kanji Kentei, which is the most difficult kanji test.
Therefore, consider what you want to achieve with your Japanese to determine how many kanji characters you have to know.
Best way to remember Japanese kanji
If you are learning the Japanese kanji, one of your main struggles will be to remember the kanji characters. Fortunately, you can use this simple 6-step approach to remember Japanese kanji:
- Learn the radicals
Begin by studying all the 214 kanji radicals. These radicals serve as the building blocks for the majority of the complex kanji characters.
- Practice stroke order
The stroke order refers to how you should write each kanji character. If you can master the stroke order, it will be easier for you to memorize kanji characters.
- Focus on jouyou kanji
There are over 50,000 kanji characters available, but you don’t need to learn all of them. You just need to focus on jouyou kanji, which are the commonly used kanji characters.
- Supplement jouyou kanji with more essential words
Although jouyou kanji contains important kanji characters, you may not need to depend on only them. Therefore, you should consider why you are learning Japanese and find the words that are more important to you. For instance, if you are learning Japanese to learn about Japanese anime, then you should combine jouyou kanji with words that are often spoken in anime.
- Take advantage of spaced repetition
Spaced repetition is an approach that requires you to remember kanji with the time intervals increasing whenever you see the character. This method will help you to learn all the characters with a focus on the ones you often get wrong.
- Study Japanese whenever kanji is included
Sometimes, people learn kanji but cannot read it in real-life situations. So, you should avoid this by reading any Japanese text as long as it has kanji characters.
Do I need to learn kanji radicals?
Yes, you need to learn kanji radicals if you want to have a good knowledge of this Japanese writing script. Before explaining why you must learn kanji radicals, let’s explain what radicals are. Simply put, radicals are the symbols and patterns that make up each kanji character. These radicals can be referred to as the building blocks for writing each kanji. Generally, you can find about 1 to 4 radicals in every kanji.
Historically, we have about 214 kanji radicals. Nevertheless, a few kanji radicals are more commonly used than the others. So, you have to first master the commonly used radicals.
More than 2,000 kanji characters are often used by Japanese speakers, but you can concentrate on the day-to-day characters at the beginning of your study. Nevertheless, it can seem cumbersome to start learning these many characters. But if you can master these kanji radicals and what they mean, it will be easier for you to learn kanji characters.
You should note that identifying the kanji radicals in a kanji character doesn’t necessarily mean that you will know its exact meaning. However, it will give you some ideas of its meaning and assist you to categorize it. Therefore, you need to learn kanji radicals.
Why does kanji stroke order matter?
When it comes to writing kanji characters, the stroke order matters a lot. For writing kanji, there are some stroke order rules, but the most important ones are:
- Writing from the top to the bottom
- Writing from the left to the right
Of course, some reasons make kanji stroke order important. Foremost, the stroke order will make it easier for you to ensure that the kanji appears correctly. Over time, you will build the right muscle memory that guarantees that you don’t need to struggle to make kanji characters look legible.
In addition, when you have learned Japanese and started using it in a day-to-day manner like others, your handwriting may be sloppier. This usually happens to everyone. But if you have been writing kanji with the right stroke order, being sloppier will make you write kanji characters in the same way that others do. Hence, people will not have any issues with reading what you have written.
However, if you have not learned the right stroke order, people will struggle with reading your kanji once your writing has become sloppier. Besides, you may not be able to read the kanji of other people with sloppy handwriting. So, as you start learning kanji, you need to master the right stroke order.
Does hiragana and Katakana stroke order matter?
Yes, hiragana stroke order matters in writing Japanese. Generally, the stroke order involves different formats such as writing from top to bottom, writing from left to right, etc. Practically, following the stroke order makes it easier for you to write. This also applies to the English language where you naturally write “f” from the top, not the bottom. Writing the letter “f” from the bottom will make it difficult for you.
Another reason why hiragana stroke order matters is that it ensures that your writing is easier to read for others. Once you have mastered the wrong principles for writing hiragana, your hiragana characters look horrible and difficult to read.
Additionally, if you don’t follow the right hiragana stroke order, you will struggle to read other people’s writing. This is because the shape of the hiragana characters of others will be different from yours. Hence, you may not be able to decipher what others have written. This also extends to digital handwriting as you need to know the proper stroke order to read it easily and quickly.
So, if you want to avoid these problems, you should understand that hiragana stroke order is important. Make sure you master the appropriate stroke order as you learn hiragana.
Should you learn hiragana or katakana or kanji first?
In order to learn the Japanese language, you will need to understand the different writing systems and aspects of the language. Due to these factors, it can be difficult to determine how and where to begin learning a new language.
Hiragana should be mastered first before moving on to Katakana and finally Kanji. To read kanji, one must be able to read it in both hiragana and katakana (also known as kunyomi and onyomi respectively).
You have come to the right place if you’ve been looking for answers to these questions, since this article will shed more light on the order in which you should learn Japanese as well as why you should study it in that particular order. Let’s get started.
How many Japanese alphabets are there?
1. Hiragana
Japanese has its own written language based on this phonetic system. Each Japanese sound is represented by this phonetic system. Thus, theoretically, hiragana can be used for any form of writing. Since Japanese texts usually do not include spaces, hiragana is not used for everything. Therefore, a Japanese text must include both kanji and hiragana characters.
In total, there are 46 hiragana characters in hiragana. These characters have distinct sounds, but their meanings do not differ.
What are the main roles of hiragana?
Taking a look at hiragana in Japanese, we can see the most important functions they play.
Hiragana is for creating grammatical structure
hiragana plays an important role in adding grammatical structure to any Japanese sentence. It can sometimes completely change the meaning of a word when it is added to it. It will be difficult to make sense of some words if you don’t have hiragana symbols.
Hiragana is used for writing
Japanese words are commonly written in hiragana characters. As previously mentioned, many Japanese words are written entirely in hiragana. In case you aren’t sure which kanji character to use in a particular case, you can use a hiragana symbol instead.
hiragana is utilized for showing pronunciation of a word
When a Japanese text includes kanji symbols that are unusual, it may be difficult to determine a word’s pronunciation. In addition, if the kanji symbol was accompanied by a hiragana character, it would be easier to understand. Yomigana and furigana are the names given to such hiragana symbols when used in this manner. Another use for hiragana is when no equivalent kanji exists for a given Japanese word.
2. Katakana
Besides hiragana, there is also katakana. Similarly to hiragana, each character corresponds to a specific syllable or sound. As with hiragana, beginners should learn katakana as soon as they can in order to develop a good understanding of the Japanese language.
What are katakana symbols used for?
There are a variety of things that can be expressed using Katakana symbols. There are also many non-Japanese words that are significant. Katakana is often used to represent something borrowed or foreign. There are several words in Japanese borrowed from English and other languages. Katakana is used for such borrowed words.
Over 80% of the time, Japanese katakana symbols represent foreign words.
Katakana makes it easier for English speakers to speak Japanese. Understanding katakana will make it easier for you to identify many words that have been borrowed from the English language.
Aside from foreign or borrowed words, you can also find katakana symbols for:
Names of some animals
Scientific words that don’t have any specific Japanese equivalent
Company names – the companies can be either foreign or local ones
Robot-speech – this refers to when Japanese texts are written as if robots are talking
Names of foods – this is particularly true for plant and animal foods as well as foreign foods
Onomatopoeia – these are words that are written in the same way as what they represent
Adding stylistic purposes to texts
Putting emphasis on some texts
Katakana characters are also useful in several other cases, but they are not as significant as the ones described above.
3.Kanji
The third alphabet of the Japanese language is kanji. In general, kanji symbols are known as logograms i.e. pictures that are used for ideas, concepts, or words. Kanji is a writing script adopted from the Chinese language and used for giving more clarity and meaning to Japanese.
Overall, there are more than 50,000 kanji symbols in Japanese. But you don’t have to worry about these characters as an average native Japanese speaker doesn’t even know more than 10 percent of these characters. As a learner, your focus should be on the first 2,000 kanji characters. From there, you can start learning more kanji symbols.
What are kanji characters used for?
Typically, kanji symbols are important when you want to describe certain content-heavy words. These words may include verbs, adverbs, nouns, as well as adjectives. As a result of this, you don’t need kanji if you only want to learn how to speak and listen to the Japanese language.
However, when it comes to writing and reading, you cannot do without knowing some important kanji characters. Kanji will probably account for over 40% of the printable symbols in an average Japanese newspaper. Therefore, if you want to read newspapers, books, food menus, and other things correctly, you need to familiarize yourself with kanji characters.
It is noteworthy that some people consider Japanese to have a fourth writing system which is called romaji. However, you should understand that romaji is not a real writing script on its own, but it is just a way of Romanizing Japanese. Romaji is only used for making it easy for foreigners to have a quick understanding of the Japanese language.
