Confused between Kanji, Furigana, Hiragana & Katakana

17 comments

1. You absolutely do need hiragana and katakana if you want to be able to read stuff. They’re the basic syllable alphabets, but don’t have any inherent meaning, “き” has as much a translation as the english “ki” does: none.

   Japanese script consists of hiragana, katakana and kanji, so you need all three of them to be able to read comfortably. As the former two only have 46 general characters each (and then some combinations/modified ones) and there are no meanings attached, it’s quite easy and quick to learn them, some need a day, some a week, some a month. If you have that base, you can (and probably should) move on to learning kanji.

   Kanji do have meaning, 木 (kanji) = き (hiragana) = ki (romaji) = tree (english translation), and often multiple readings that depend on the vocabulary/combination they show up in, so obviously there’s a ton of kanji you need if you want to read whatever Japanese you encounter, and it takes time to learn them.

   Furigana are the hiragana/katakana reading aids for kanji, showing up above a kanji (edit: like here, I’m too dumb to make the furigana work inline: [https://jisho.org/word/%E6%9C%A8](https://jisho.org/word/%E6%9C%A8)). Those are meant to help read unknown/infrequent kanji so you don’t get stumped.

   Edit: if you want, you can give the wikipedia page on Japanese script a go, it works well enough as a general overview: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_writing_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_writing_system)

2. Hiragana and Katakana are more basic, kinda like the English alphabet. Katakana is mostly for attempting other languages words, such as English. Kanji is characters taken from Chinese that are all pronounced from Hiragana, Furigana is the Hiragana shown above Kanji to help pronunciation.

3. As you know, Kanji can represent 1 or more hiragana / katakana characters, like in 私 (わたし). Furigana is supposed to be on top of the kanji in case you don’t know how to read the kanji.

4. Romaji, or “Roman characters”, are used to transcribe words so foreigners (ie Americans/English) can read them. For example, “hon” is romaji. When you learn how to pronounce it, you’ll learn that it sounds very much like “hone”, as in “to hone your skills”, but with a bit of a clipped ending for the “n” part. By the way, “hon” means “book”.

   Hiragana is used to represent syllables in most native Japanese words – words that are not loanwords from English or French. “Hon” is one of those words – and, in hiragana, it’s written has ほん. The syllable ほ is pronounced “ho”, and the syllable ん is pronounced “n”. Most Japanese syllables are either just a vowel (like あ for a), a consonant plus a vowel (like か for ka), or are a blended i-syllable plus a small ya/yu/yo (like きゃ for kya, which is a blend of ki and ya). The ん syllable is an exception- it’s the only syllable with just a consonant,

   In books aimed for an adult audience, hiragana is used mostly for grammatical parts – particles that show toxic, subject, object, or possession, or the endings if verbs like the べます hiragana in 食べます. Occasionally, hiragana is used for words that just don’t have commonly used kanji. I think おはよう (ohayou, or “good morning”) is commonly written in hiragana, for example…I’m sure someone here might know the kanji.

   Katakana is used mainly for loanwords. For example, アマリカ, or “amerika” in romaji, You can probably guess what that means. It’s also occasionally used for emphasis like italics, or in speech bubbles to imply a robot or robotic voice.

   Kanji are what you see most often for nouns, the stems of many adjectives, and the stems of most verbs. For example, 本 is the kanji for ほん, “hon”, or “book”. Here’s the thing about kanji – they don’t have just one pronunciation. For example, 日本 means “Japan”, and is pronounced にほん, or “nihon”. But that same 日 can be used twice in 日曜日 – にちようび, or “nichiyoubi”, which means “Sunday”. The first character means “sun”, while the second two characters mean “day of the week”.

   Furigana is just hiragana that’s put over the kanji to aid both Japanese children and learners of Japanese. It’s also used for kanji that might be difficult for native speakers to read.

5. [I’ve made up this quick image to help explain.](https://i.imgur.com/rWNXXqO.png)

   The red are katakana.

   The black are hiragana.

   The blue are kanji.

   The hiragana with the green underline are furigana, which tell you how to read the kanji they’re above. Most of the time furigana aren’t used unless the text is meant for young/beginner readers, or the kanji is especially rare.

   The hiragana with the yellow underline are okurigana. They serve two purposes: to inflect adjectives and verbs, and to force a particular kanji to have a specific meaning and be read a certain way.

   Romaji: Mina wa hon o yomimasu.

   Translation: Mina reads a book.

   Hopefully that answers your questions.

6. Hiragana are like letters or sounds in English. Start with this first. Katakana is the exact same letters/sounds, but used for foreign words (like computer). After learning these, you will be able to write anything you want. You’ll be able to read some beginner texts (like children’s stories or beginning textbooks).

   Next start learning kanji. These are essentially sight words. While you can write any word in hiragana, adult texts are written in a mix of hiragana and kanji. You will need to know both of them.

   Furigana is the bridge between hiragana and kanji. Some texts, in order to help beginners, will put the hiragana above each kanji to help you know how to pronounce it. Again, you will need to know hiragana first but this tool will help you make the bridge between hiragana and kanji.

7. I recommend first hiragana, next katakana. You can bang out both pretty quickly and they will teach you about how Japanese is pronounced. Some things are written only in those, like a lot of video games or children’s books. Katakana is used for foreign loan words so if you can read katakana there’s a good chance you’ll understand those easily. Katakana and hiragana are phonetic (like the English alphabet) and so you can always know how they are pronounced, and there aren’t that many of them (a comparable amount to our 26 letters). As an example see あ. This is hiragana “a”, and is always pronounced like “ah”. However it doesn’t have any meaning on its own unless it is spelling out a longer word like ありがとう, arigatou / thank you. It took 5 hiragana to spell that one word.

   Kanji are the Chinese characters and they are pictorial, not phonetic. This means that there are a lot more (thousands). It also means that even if you recognize the character you may not know how it is being pronounced, as it is not a phonetic alphabet. Most characters have multiple pronunciations. As an example, see 女. This is the character for girl or woman, and you might be able to vaguely recognize the picture of a person that it evolved from. It can be pronounced a couple of ways, one is “Onna”, another is “Jyo”, and you have to memorize both and look at the surrounding context of the sentence to know which pronunciation is being used. However even without the pronunciation you immediately know that it means woman or female without any additional characters spelling out the complete word.

   Furigana is just a little helper hiragana written under a kanji to tell you how it’s pronounced if you don’t know it. You don’t have to learn anything new specific to it. Furigana aren’t used in most regular Japanese writing, but you may see it in video games, manga, or other things for younger people (or for language learners).

   Again for beginners start with hiragana and katakana. Once you feel comfortable with those you can begin on kanji, which will be a more ongoing process as you learn more and more. If you want to really consume Japanese media you’ll need to learn all of katakana and hiragana and at least a decent amount of kanji (around 2000 is generally considered to cover the mainly used ones, but you will probably still encounter new ones basically forever if you are doing a lot of Japanese reading)

8. Alright, haven’t read other people’s comments, but here’s a run-through. Hiragana is a different script, same with Katakana. They have different purposes than Kanji.

   Katakana カタカナ – used for names or loan-words from other languages. Think オレン, or orange

   Hiragana ひらがな – used for grammar. This can also be used to write out Kanji phonetically, which is called Furigana. Hiragana can also be used to add different conjugations to verbs, or with Kanji to add different pronunciations.

   Kanji 漢字 – taken from the Chinese script, it’s a logograph script used for most words, like nouns and verbs.

   If you ask me, learn Hiragan and Katakana first, these are necessary for learning Japanese. After that, learn some basic grammar and Vocab, work on making sentences like
   私わ(your name)です

   There ya go, simplified Japanese.

   Also correct me if im wrong about anything, I’m pretty new to Japanese too

9. It’s better explained by others, but my two cents for what little it’s worth.

   Hiragana – basic alphabet, often used for native-Japanese words.

   Katakana – often used for foreign words, loanwords and onomatopoeia (written sounds). Sometimes also used for emphasis.

   Kanji – writing system. Used to distinguish specific words.

   Furigana- reading guide. Written above (or beside, depending on written orientation) to help reader pronounce a written word. Very helpful with names. Sometimes used in literature to introduce specific terms to that work (sadly, the best example I have of this is in the Monogatari series, the usage of the specific “oddities” i.e. the 思い蟹 (おもいがに))

10. you needed to learn both hiragana and katakana before learning kanji. Their purpose varies, to be able to read a sentense (wich is often a mix of the three) to signal different parts in a sentence and/ or names and loan words.

    Example:
    私 は 21歳 です.
    the particles are in hiragana (は,です)、the rest is kanji.
    In romaji it would read: watashi was nijuu ichi sai desu.

    now let’s say you learn kanji, some have ways or reading that are common but some don’t, that’s what furigana is for, one kanji alonside another whose reading is uncommon is normally aided by hiragana to know how to read it.

    Example:

    じんせいゆめのごとし(the way of reading aka furigana, usually in a smaller font)
    人生夢の如し。

    you don’t need to learn furigana because is only an aid.

11. Hiragana is the main phonetic writing system. It presents you characters and explains you how to read them. Katakana is basically the same as Hiragana in phonetical manners, but the characters look a little different. This is because Katakana was introduced to translate foreign words, that are not in the Japanese language, into the phonetic of Japanese.
    But if Japanese doesn’t use whitespace between characters and when you would writeeverythinginhiraganaitwouldlooklikethis.
    So that’s why Kanji is used. It makes a word shorter. For instance instead of writing the word “I”, which has three characters in Japanese (わたし) you can put it into one kanji that looks like thus:私.

    But next time do a deep internet research. This stuff is asked pretty much by every Japanese beginner and the internet is with explanations like this. I recommend the Tofugo guide to Japanese to start with.

    And don’t try to rush Japanese. If you are in a hurry, you’ll likely never stick to that language. Soak the language up. Live it. Be one part of the culture or you will otherwise lose your breath fast.

12. The katakanis actually come from the Karate practice of “kata”, in which karateka would draw these characters with their strikes, kind of like a dance. Each drawing apart of the word “マンゴ” would increase the speed and power of their strikes significantly.

    とっても面白い

13. hiragana and katakana is basically the alphabet, while kanji kanji is just Chinese adapted into Japanese.

14. Let me preface this by saying that you should learn them in this order: hiragana, katakana, kanji.

    Hiragana is a phonetic script – this means that every character is pronounced as you see it (except particles but that’s another story). It is used for Japanese words.

    Katakana is also a phonetic script, used for foreign words. For example, camera would be written in katakana.

    Furigana is the Japanese term for “hiragana and katakana that show you how to pronounce kanji”.

    Kanji are characters taken from Chinese, often with 2 or more possible pronunciations (readings) depending on context. Many are more than one syllable and they are often much more difficult to write and memorise than kana (which is an umbrella term for hiragana and katakana).

    You may also see people talk about romaji: that’s the roman script (the one you’re reading now).

15. Hiragana and katakana are sounds, while kanji are concepts or words, i would recommend you learn hiragana first, then katakana and later kanji. Also furigana is just hiragana put on top of kanji sometimes so you can read it.

16. Start with Hiragana and then Katakana and maybe just some very basic Kanji.

    Lots of reading material will have the Furigana written above or next to the Kanji so you can still read it despite not knowing the Kanji. Its also a good way to learn new Kanji.

17. Definitely Hiragana and Katakana to start. They are not simplified Kanji but they do make the sounds that form the Kanji. At least the Hiragana does. Katakana mainly just covers words that are not from Japanese origin. コート (ko to) meaning coat. バス (ba su) meaning bus and so forth. If I remember correctly, furigana isn’t an alphabet. Its what you call the hiragana and katakana writing style when referring to them both as a whole. All of these are 100% necessary in learning the language. They all play their own part and you will often times see all three writing systems in the same sentence. このコートは赤いです (this coat is red) is a good example of how all three systems are used together to create sentences