The Japanese writing system

In the sentence 私はコーヒーを飲みます (watashi wa kōhī o nomimasu, 'I drink coffee'), each script plays its part. The kanji 私 (I) and 飲 (drink) carry the meaning; the hiragana は, を and みます mark grammar and verb endings; and the katakana コーヒー spells a word borrowed from Dutch.

This division makes texts easier to read than they look. Kanji give the eye anchors, because content words stand out from the grammatical glue around them, and Japanese is written without spaces between words.

Chinese characters were in use in Japan by the fifth century, first for writing classical Chinese. To write Japanese itself, scribes borrowed characters purely for their sound; the eighth-century poetry anthology Man'yōshū is written largely this way, so the phonetic use of kanji is called man'yōgana.

In the ninth and tenth centuries these phonetic characters were simplified in two directions. Cursive forms became hiragana, closely associated with court literature by women such as The Tale of Genji. Fragments of characters, noted in the margins of Buddhist texts by monks, became katakana. For centuries the two were used in different spheres; the mixed kanji-kana style of modern Japanese became the norm with the language reforms after 1868 and especially after 1946.

Most kanji have more than one reading. On'yomi are Sino-Japanese readings derived from Chinese pronunciation, used mainly in compounds; kun'yomi are native Japanese words attached to the character. 山 is read san in 富士山 (Fuji-san) but yama when it stands alone.

When a reading is rare or the reader is young or a learner, small kana called furigana are printed next to or above the kanji. Children's books, manga for younger readers and textbooks use them widely, and they are a great help to learners.

Japanese can be written vertically, in columns read from top to bottom and from right to left, or horizontally from left to right. Novels, newspapers and most manga use vertical text, which is why their books open from what a European reader thinks of as the back. Websites, science, business documents and textbooks for learners are usually horizontal.

Punctuation is simple: 。 is the full stop and 、 the comma. Quotation marks take the form 「 」.

The government does not ban characters, but it defines a reference set. The jōyō kanji list, issued by cabinet notice in 2010 and maintained by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, sets out 2,136 characters for general use in official documents, newspapers and education. Primary schools teach a subset of 1,026 characters, the kyōiku kanji, over six years; the rest follows in secondary school.

A separate list of characters approved for personal names (jinmeiyō kanji) exists alongside it, which is why names can contain characters outside the everyday set.

Almost every course begins with hiragana, which can be learnt in a week or two and allows any Japanese word to be written. Katakana follows, and kanji are then learnt steadily over years, together with vocabulary. Relying on rōmaji beyond the first days slows learners down, because textbooks and real texts are written in kana and kanji.