There are three styles of Japanese writing that you would need to learn in order to be able to read Japanese thoroughly. All three styles are used in combination to form Japanese writing. There is the Kanji which originated from Chinese characters, the Katakan which are the symbols or the characters of Japanese and the Hiragana which is the grammatical relationship between the two.

The Kanji originally came from Chinese characters called hànzì and represents the nouns, adjectives and verbs. In 1981 the Japanese government introduced the jōyō kanji hyō which is a list of Chinese characters for general use. This list includes 1,945 regular characters and 166 special characters that represent people’s names.

Today there are two styles of Kanji – the Kun yomi which is the Japanese reading of the character and the yomi which is the Chinese reading of the character.

Katakana is the symbols or the characters of Japanese. These are mostly names and places. There are approximately 48 symbols that are used the most. Once you learn these 48 syllables, you will know the basics for reading Japanese signs.

There are over 1000 katakana characters that the Japanese learn in school. A beginners introduction to Japanese is best if you start with the same basic katakana characters that they teach to lower grades. Katakana was originally considered to be men’s writing. The symbols on the left are basic katakana syllables. The symbols on the right are the diacritics and the combination symbols.

Hiragana is the grammatical relationship between the Kanji and Hirgana – basically it is the adjective, the verbs and the particles. Hiragana was originally called onnade which means women’s hand. There are 48 syllables that are used mainly to end the words. Hiragana is used in children’s books, textbooks, animation and comic books. http://www.omniglot.com/writing/japanese_hiragana.htm

The following is the basic hiragana symbols:

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