How Does The Japanese Writing System in a Nutshell Work?

Japanese has three types of characters that work together like a team, kind of like how your friends help you build a tower with blocks.

Imagine you're playing with three kinds of blocks: red ones, blue ones, and yellow ones. Each color represents a different way to make words.

• Kanji are like the yellow blocks, they’re pictures that stand for whole ideas or sounds. For example, the kanji 山 means “mountain.”
• Hiragana are like the red blocks, soft and squishy, used for writing words that are easier to say, like the word for "apple" is りんご.
• Katakana are like the blue blocks, hard and bumpy, used for writing new words from other languages, like “computer” becomes コンピューター.

When you put them all together, it's like building a tower with red, blue, and yellow blocks. Sometimes you use only one type of block, and sometimes you mix them up to make the most interesting towers, or the most interesting sentences! Japanese has three types of characters that work together like a team, kind of like how your friends help you build a tower with blocks.

Imagine you're playing with three kinds of blocks: red ones, blue ones, and yellow ones. Each color represents a different way to make words.