What is the Japanese writing system like?
Where English has one alphabet of 26 letters (plus their capital equivalents), Japanese uses 2 phonetic alphabets known as kana (hiragana and katakana) together with numerous characters originally borrowed from Chinese, called kanji. How many characters are there? Japanese people learn around 2000 kanji as part of their compulsory education, which is the number required to read a newspaper properly. In practice, many Japanese adults know several thousand more! There are also 50 characters in each set of kana. How does it work? A typical piece of writing in Japanese consists of a mixture of both kana and kanji. In simple terms, words are written using kanji combinations, and the hiragana used to fuse them together by adding conjunctions, verb endings and other such information. The katakana are mostly used to write words borrowed from other languages (mainly English). What direction is Japanese written in? Newspapers and books normally write vertically from right to left, working down t
