The Japanese writing system consists of three types of characters: hiragana, katakana, and kanji.

When I was at a lower level of Japanese, I used to complain about the Japanese writing system all of the time. Yeah, I was fascinated by it. But at the same time I loathed its very existence. It is, after all, the most intimidating aspect of the Japanese language. Looking back, however, it's not all that bad to get through.

There are two ways that you'll see Japanese characters written on a page: (1) horizontally, from left to right, like English and (2) vertically, from top to bottom and from right to left.

If you study Japanese in school, there's a good chance they'll have you write horizontally, from left to right.

However, if you read a novel, or any upper-level reading material, chances are that it will be written from top to bottom and from right to left. It sounds difficult, but actually it's not too hard to read like this, thanks to the way Japanese characters are written.

There are three kinds of Japanese characters:

• Kanji (kah-n-jee) 漢字
• Hiragana (hee-rah-gah-nah) ひらがな
• Katakana (kah-tah-kah-nah) カタカナ

All three of them are used together in sentences. It's usually pretty obvious when to use which one. You might hear people sometimes refer to hiragana and katakana as simply 'kana.' Although it will take at least a few months to learn all of the kanji (which I'll talk about extensively in Phase #2), it should only take a week or two to learn Hiragana and Katakana. Yay!

So let's do that first.

These two types of characters are our main concern for now.

Hiragana and Katakana are not hard to learn. They are both used to represent the sound syllables that make up the Japanese language. So, for instance, 'ka' in hiragana / katakana would be か / カ.

Each of these syllabaries (alphabets) has 46 basic characters (sounds).

Hiragana is usually used to represent Japanese words and grammatical elements (e.g. particles), while Katakana is usually used for words of foreign origin.

So, for example, sumimasen, which means “sorry” or “excuse me,” would be written in hiragana, because it's a word of Japanese origin: すみません.

However, a word like nekutai, which means (get this) “necktie,” would be written in katakana, because it's a foreign loan word: ネクタイ.

Often these loan words will just be English words with a Japanese pronunciation, like the example just shown. The cool thing about this is that once you learn katakana, you will have learned to read thousands of words in Japanese. This is why katakana is a great syllabary to learn if you're just going to Japan for a short trip. It will come in handy, I promise. For your perusal, here are the complete lists of both hiragana and katakana characters:

Hiragana Chart

Katakana Chart

For absolute beginners, I highly recommend printing out hiragana and katakana charts and keeping them close by as you study Japanese. You can use these ones, or you can look some up online—there are lots of great ones floating around out there. You now have a cheat sheet for reading Japanese characters. Nice!

Here they are in PDF Format:

You might notice that a lot of katakana characters look just like hiragana characters, only more rigid.

Maybe those charts seem a bit overwhelming. Honestly, you don't need to worry about it, though, because we have…