Japanese language and characters

There are three different kinds of characters used in Japanese text: Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana. Kanji are derived from ancient Chinese characters. These characters, of which there are thousands, are used in Japan, China, Mongolia and Korea. However, the sounds used for the characters are very different in each country. In Japan, Kanji is always used for writing people's names.

Most Japanese text is a mixture of the three different character sets. Hiragana and Katakana have 50 characters each, but Katakana is predominantly used for writing words that are borrowed from other languages or cultures. Spoken Japanese has 50 different sounds which can be described by either Katakana or Hiragana characters.

Before children enter elementary school, they must take an examination to ensure that they have already learned all of the Katakana and Hiragana characters. The education system in Japan is such that children are taught a certain number of Kanji characters throughout grade school. The specific Kanji characters taught in each grade (generally a few hundred per year) are set by the Ministry of Education. The average Japanese person will be able to understand over 6,000 Kanji characters.

Japanese characters are either written horizontally from left to right, as in English, or vertically from top to bottom starting from the right side of the page.