Letters · 4 min
Why Japanese mixes three scripts
It looks inconvenient, but there is a reason: in a language without spaces, switching scripts does the job of spacing.
There are no spaces
Japanese sentences do not put spaces between words. Imagine English written as "idrankcoffeetoday".
Yet real Japanese is not especially hard to parse, because every switch from one script to another marks a boundary.
Take 私はコーヒーを飲みます。 It alternates kanji (私), hiragana (は), katakana (コーヒー), hiragana (を), then kanji plus hiragana (飲みます). Your eye chunks it automatically.
Each script has a job
| Script | Job | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Kanji | Meaning-bearing words — nouns, verb and adjective stems | 私, 飲, 山, 学校 |
| Hiragana | Grammar — particles, endings, native words without kanji | は, を, ます, ありがとう |
| Katakana | Loanwords, foreign names, sound effects, emphasis | コーヒー, ソウル, ドキドキ |
| Roman letters | Abbreviations and brand names | JR, ATM, NHK |
Roman letters (rōmaji) turn up routinely as a fourth script, so in practice there are four, not three.
What happens without kanji
That sentence in hiragana alone is わたしはこーひーをのみます. Readable, but it takes real effort to find the breaks.
Japanese also has a great many homophones. はし alone covers 橋 (bridge), 箸 (chopsticks) and 端 (edge) — all "hashi". In kanji they are distinct at a glance; in kana you need the surrounding context.
That is why children’s books and beginner textbooks, which lean on hiragana, put spaces between words. With no kanji signposts, spaces have to stand in.
Kana first is the right order
Hearing that there are 2,136 everyday kanji is discouraging, but kana comes first regardless.
Particles and inflections are all hiragana. Know kana and the skeleton of a sentence — who, what, did what — starts to show even with zero kanji. The reverse is not true: kanji without kana reads as nothing.
Kanji also often come with furigana, small kana printed alongside to give the reading. Once you know kana, anything with furigana is something you can read aloud.