Japanese

かな

Logograms · 128 letters

One sign per word, and thousands to remember. No reading shortcut: what pays off in a round is not reading but recognising a few frequent shapes. Chinese, and the Japanese that borrows them.

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What pays off on the road

• Only one country writes it: round and angular kana mixed with kanji is Japan — recognising the texture is enough.
• 出口 exit, 入口 entrance, 駅前 station front — and katakana, which read without vocabulary: ホテル, hotel.
• Reading a name: thirty-six kanji, by meaning — 県 prefecture, 市 city, 町 town, 村 village, 駅 station. 市 is the commonest of our names.

How it works

Three scripts in the same sentence

An ordinary Japanese sentence uses all three at once: kanji for the content words, hiragana for the grammar that links them, katakana for what comes from elsewhere. Nothing separates them — no spaces, no capitals — and it is precisely the alternation of the three that cuts the sentence up.

A sign is almost always simpler: a place name in kanji, sometimes doubled in Latin letters, and the service word in kanji or katakana. That is what is taught here.

Kanji first, because they are what places you

A Japanese place name is written in kanji. The direction sign, the exit marker, the station front, the plate on the street corner: everything that says where you are goes through them. Thirty-six signs are enough to read almost every prefecture name and most city names.

You do not learn them as letters, you recognise them. A kanji is pronounced two to six ways depending on the word, and asking "how is 生 read" has no answer. What does have one, and what serves, is what it means: 駅 is a station, 県 a prefecture, 出口 an exit.

Katakana come next, and for another reason: they do not name places, but a katakana word is a loanword, and transcribing it is enough to understand it without knowing a word of Japanese — ホテル gives "hoteru", that is hotel. They make shop fronts and menus readable, which is what fills the street around the name.

Katakana are angular, hiragana round: you tell them apart from far away without being able to read them, and seeing an angular word in the middle of a shop sign already tells you it is foreign.

Kanji are recognised, not read

A kanji is pronounced two to six ways depending on the word it sits in: 日 reads "nichi", "hi", "bi" or "ka". Asking how it is read therefore has no answer out of context — which is why here we ask what it means.

Thirty-six are enough for a sign. 駅 is a station, 県 a prefecture, 出口 an exit, 中央 downtown. Put together they can be guessed: 空港 is "the harbour of the sky", an airport; 日本 is "the origin of the sun", the name of the country.

The forty-seven prefectures

Forty-three end in 県, and that word alone says you are reading a prefecture name. The other four do not hide it: Tokyo is 東京都, Osaka 大阪府, Kyoto 京都府, and Hokkaido 北海道 — the only one whose name carries its nature.

The map quiz "Japanese prefectures in Japanese" makes you place them all; this one teaches the signs they are made of.

Cheat sheet

The kanji on signs

Thirty-six signs, and they are what places you: a Japanese place name is written in kanji, on direction signs as on markers and stations. Their meaning rather than their reading — a kanji is pronounced two to six ways depending on the word, and what you want in front of a sign is what it means. Put together they can be guessed: 空港 is "the harbour of the sky".

Katakana

Angular, and reserved for what comes from elsewhere. Forty-six signs that make shop fronts and menus readable with no vocabulary at all: a katakana word is a loanword, and transcribing it is enough to understand it. They do not name places, but they fill the street.

Hiragana

Round, and reserved for Japanese grammar. The same forty-six sounds as katakana, different shapes. They pay off the most slowly of the three — you need vocabulary for what they write to mean anything — but without them you cannot read 止まれ.

The words on signs

Countries

Japan

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