When I had to choose a foreign language to study in high school, my choices were Spanish, French, German, and Japanese. Despite my parents' encouragement to study Spanish, (as it would arguably be the most useful where we lived), I was much more intrigued by the idea—and the challenge—of learning Japanese.
I ended up studying Japanese for four years and then teaching English in Japan for a year after college. Teaching English and studying Japanese gave me a keen appreciation for how hard English is to learn compared to Japanese. English is famously full of inconsistent spellings, exceptions to grammar and spelling rules, and other things that don't makes sense. Japanese, I was pleased to find, is actually quite consistent and logical both phonetically and grammatically. There are some exceptions, of course, and you have to get used to learning formal and informal ways of speaking, but it's quite straightforward compared to English.
Japanese has two phonetic alphabets.Photo credit: Canva
In fact, if Japanese were only written phonetically, it would be a pretty easy language to learn, even with 46 characters in its "alphabet." But the writing of Japanese isn't limited to just 46 characters, which is the one thing that makes it exceptionally difficult.
In fact, as a video from NativLang explains, Japanese may just be the hardest writing system in the world. It's not the 46-character alphabet (which is actually a syllabary, which I'll get to in a moment). It's not even the fact that there are actually two 46-character alphabets. It's the fact that written Japanese is a mix of those two alphabets, so 92 syllabic characters to memorize, plus thousands of Chinese characters. And the Chinese characters aren't phonetic, so you just have to memorize what they are, how to write them, what they mean, and how they're pronounced in Japanese (which depends on how they're used and combined).
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Sound confusing? It is. Here's a more thorough breakdown.
The two alphabets (which are actually syllabaries because the characters aren't really letters that represent phonemes but rather symbols that represent syllables that combine phonemes, like "ka" or "fu" or "shi") are called hiragana and katakana. Both hiragana and katakana include the exact same 46 syllables, but hiragana is used for Japanese words, while katakana is used for words imported from other languages (and a few other contexts, like scientific names and onomatopoeia). This would be the equivalent of Americans using a separate-but-parallel alphabet made up of entirely different letters to write words like "ballet" or "teriyaki" or "blintz" since they aren't English words. You get used to it pretty quickly when learning Japanese, but it's not a concept we have in English at all.
If hiragana and katakana were all you had to learn to read and write Japanese, that would pose somewhat of a challenge, but it would still be easier to read and write than English. Once you know how the characters are pronounced and a few little rules about how pronunciations are tweaked, it's easy to read and write using these syllabaries. Even if you had no idea what you were saying, you could read a Japanese children's book that uses hiragana and katakana out loud and sound totally fluent. The pronunciations are pretty much always exactly as written.
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But that's not how Japanese writing works beyond kindergarten. Most of what you see in written Japanese are actually Chinese characters called kanji. The tricky thing about kanji is that 1) the characters are much more complex than hiragana and katakana, and 2) they aren't symbols that represent syllables, but rather pictures that represent words or ideas. There's no phonetic element to them as written—you have to know what they mean and then apply the Japanese pronunciation to them based on understanding their meaning in context. This is complicated by the fact that two kanji separately mean something different when they are put together. And did I mention there are upwards of 50,000 possible kanji characters?
Don't worry—to read and write fluently in Japanese, you don't have memorize tens of thousands of Chinese characters. I remember someone in Japan telling me that you "only" need to know around 2,000 kanji characters to read a standard Japanese newspaper. So, you can memorize only 92 hiragana and katakana symbols plus 2,000 characters, and you're golden.
Oh, and there are actually four different kinds of kanji, briefly explained here:
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People who've studied Japanese weighed in on the comments of NativLang's video, humorously lamenting the challenge of learning kanji:
"Kanji is for people who want to learn something new every day... for the rest of their lives," wrote one person.
"Chinese: makes complicated writing system. China, Korea, Vietnam: changes it to be simple. Japan: Makes it even more complicated," added another.
"I'm Japanese, but some Japanese actually can't write more than 2,000 kanjis," shared another. "And we can't also read many words that are made of over 2 kanjis. Because there are many words in Japanese. However we can guess the meaning of some words. So you should remember the meanings of them and be able to write about 1,000 kanjis. It's also native level. Thank you for studying Japanese."
I will say, learning kanji does get easier and in some ways it's like learning "sight words" in English. Then again, I never got close to writing 1,000 of them. But throw in the fact that Japanese is usually written vertically, and from right to left, and there are no spaces in between words…yeah. It's a fascinating challenge. So, if you're interested in learning Japanese, it's wise to focus on spoken Japanese and the two kana syllabaries (since they help with understanding Japanese pronunciation) and just slowly chip away at the kanji, knowing it's going to be an ultramarathon and definitely not a sprint.
Japanese has two phonetic alphabets.
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