We learned two types of Japanese character sets --- ひらがな and かたかな so far. Both hiragana and katakana comprise the phonetic writing system called かな. Japanese has a third, non-phonetic character set called kanji. Kanji characters originally came from China around the 4th century. Both ひらがな and かたかな are derivatives of kanji as shown below.

Kanji	加 (read as "ka")	奈 (read as "na")	Character from China
Katakana	カ	ナ	parts taken from kanji; straight lines and angles
Hiragana	か	な	simplified from kanji; rounder, softer lines

In normal writing, all three character sets are used together. Kanji characters are primarily used to write content words such as nouns 本(ほん), 車(くるま), verbs 来(き)ます and adjectives 白(しろ)い and 有名(ゆうめい)な. ひらがな are used to write grammatical markers such as particles (は, が, を), and the conjugational endings of verbs and adjectives. かたかな is used to write words of foreign origin (スミス [Smith]), non-human sounds (ワンワン　[dogs barking], ガチャガチャ [noisy machines]) and onomatopoeic words (キラキラ [shiny as stars], ポカポカ [warm as in the sun]). In addition to ひらがな, かたかな, and kanji, written Japanese also includes Roman letters and Arabic numerals, so that even in one short headline or small newspaper ad, one can find a mixture of these five different types of characters.

Although some tens of thousands of kanji exist, only some 3,000 are in actual use. Of these, about 1,950 have been selected by the Japanese Ministry of Education as joyo kanji (常用漢字 (じょうようかんじ)), or "Characters for General Use." Of these joyo kanji, some 1,000 have been designated as kyoiku kanji (教育漢字(きょういくかんじ)) or "Characters for Educational Use." Japanese students, by the end of the 9th grade, must learn to read and write all of the kyoiku kanji and to read all of joyo kanji. Japanese publications such as books, journals, and newspapers generally limit themselves to the use of joyo kanji, that are essential for everyday communication. If kanji characters beyond joyo kanji are used in publications, they are attached with the reading help appearing above or on the right side of kanji (called よみがな or "ruby" text like this):

Kanji characters have two kinds of pronunciations or readings: くんよみ (くん readings), which are of native Japanese origin, and オンよみ (オン readings), which are Japanese approximations of Chinese pronunciations. Most kanji characters in use in Japan have at least one オン reading and one くん reading (although many characters have more than one くん and/or オン reading). Some kanji characters have オン readings only. Therefore, the same kanji can be pronounced differently depending on the context. For example, the kanji 本 in 日本 ("Japan") is pronounced as ほん while 本 in 山本 ("Yamamoto," family name) is pronounced as もと. Similarly, 人 in 日本人 ("Japanese people") is pronounced as じん while 人 in 日本の人 ("people in Japan") is pronounced as ひと.

It is also possible for different, unrelated kanji to have the same pronunciation as shown below. These kanji characters with the same pronunciation are not interchangeable. 買(か)う means to "buy" while 書(か)く means to "write." Be sure to learn the right kanji for the word.

Kanji characters can be categorized into one of the following four groups.

1. pictographs, or simplified pictures of physical objects
   

   = mountain

   = eye

   
   
2. symbol characters, which represent abstract ideas
   

   = above

   = below

   
   
3. ideographs, or meaningful combinations of two or more pictographs or symbols
   

   = tree

   = woods/grove

   = forest

   
   
4. phonetic-ideographic characters, or those made up of a semantic (meaning) element and phonetic (sounding) element
   

   モン, gate +	mouth		モン, to ask
   grass +	カ, transform		カ, flower

Stroke order and direction are very important in writing kanji. Note the following rules of writing kanji.

• A horizontal stroke goes from left to right, top to bottom.
  
  

  

   

• A vertical stroke goes from top to bottom, left to right.
  
  

  

   

• A box is completed in the following order. You close the box last.
  
  

  
  

There are three distinct stroke endings.

stop

release

hook

The same kanji characters may look different depending on which font they are written in. When you learn kanji for the first time, always learn to write kanji in the handwriting-font style (top-left below). Other font styles need to be recognized, but do not write kanji in those styles.

Handwriting Font (Kyokasho Font) (Learn to write in this style.)	Printed Font (Mincho Font) (For recognition only)
Brush Stroke Font (Gyosho Font) (For recognition only)	Your Default Computer Font (For recognition only)
	田中日本山上下人 一二三四五六七八九十 学生先私外大小

Caution:

Your computer may substitute a Chinese-based font if it cannot access the required Japanese font. In that case, some kanji characters may appear in non-standard kanji. Some of these non-standard characters may be very different and unrecognized by the native Japanese speakers.