Kanji is not the Japanese alphabet

Kanji are not the Japanese alphabet, and Japanese does not have one. Kanji (漢字) are characters, historically from Chinese, used inside Japanese writing for most word stems. Around them sit two kana syllabaries: hiragana and katakana. People who search “what is kanji” or “what are Japanese letters called” are usually staring at a sentence that uses all three, and asking for one name.

The names: kanji for the characters, hiragana for the cursive syllabary, katakana for the angular one. Romaji is a Latin spelling, like pinyin. It is not a fourth Japanese script you will see on a novel page.

46, then 71, and still not kanji

The school chart of basic kana, the modern gojūon without the obsolete ゐ and ゑ, has 46 hiragana and 46 katakana. Voicing marks add 25 shapes: twenty with dakuten (が, ざ, だ, ば and their rows) and five with handakuten (ぱぴぷぺぽ). 46 + 25 = 71. Those 25 are not new skeletons. They are the same kana plus two dashes or a circle. Small ゃ, ゅ, ょ make compounds such as きゃ. They are combinations, not a third alphabet.

[[chart:ld-kana-set]]

Switch the chart. The first view is the basic set, 46 and 46. The second view counts the voiced shapes as separate written forms, 71 and 71. Both views are kana. Neither bar is the kanji list. That list is 2,136 general-use characters in the 2010 jōyō table, and it is a different article: how many kanji.

Which way the line goes

“Is Japanese right to left?” has two honest answers, and neither is “like Arabic”.

• Horizontal text, the usual direction in textbooks and on screens, runs left to right, top to bottom.
• Vertical text runs top to bottom, and the columns move from right to left. Newspapers and novels still use it.

A page can use both. The script did not pick one direction and keep it as a rule of the language. If you are copying a vertical sign into a horizontal note, you are changing the path of the eye, not translating.

What you can read after one week of kana

With the 46, you can sound out anything written in hiragana, including the grammar glued to a kanji stem: 食べた is a kanji plus kana. You cannot yet read the stem. That is the point of keeping the counts apart. Kana is the small system. Kanji is the list. How those two sizes sit next to Mandarin pinyin is the spelling bridge.

Why this method works

Naming the script is the difference between a card you can grade and a card that says “Japanese”. Hiragana endings tell you grammar. Katakana flags a loan. Kanji hold the stem. If those three are one pile called “letters”, every miss looks like the same miss, and you will drill kana you already know while the stem stays blank.

Run this session

Fifteen minutes. One sentence: 私はコーヒーを飲みます.

1. 0–3 min. Mark each character: 私 and 飲 are kanji, は を み ま す are hiragana, コーヒー is katakana. Say that out loud before you translate.
2. 3–8 min. Cover the romaji if you wrote any. Read the kana. If を comes out as wo the letter and not the particle, note it and move on. Do not restart the whole chart.
3. 8–15 min. Cards only for the two kanji. Front: 私, back: watashi and the sentence. Front: 飲, back: nomu in 飲みます. Cover. The coffee word stays in katakana. It is not a kanji to invent.

Common traps

• Calling everything kanji. Fix: if it is a looped syllabary sign, it is kana. Count it in the 46, not in the 2,136.
• “Japanese is right to left.” Fix: horizontal text is left to right. Vertical columns run top to bottom, and the columns move right to left.
• Adding 71 and 46 as if they were different alphabets. Fix: 71 is the basic 46 plus 25 voiced shapes of the same skeletons.

Romaji is a convenience for passports and for your first week. It is not on the shop sign. If your notes are still in romaji after the 46 are readable, you are practising a spelling the country does not write.

Cover the back in Study Lab. When you are ready for timed practice, choose JLPT. The JLPT does not publish an official kanji inventory. The school lists do.