Does Japanese use letters or characters?

Both. Kanji are characters (they convey meaning), hiragana and katakana are syllabaries where a sign equals a syllable, not a sound.

What types of Japanese characters are there?

By origin, kanji are divided into pictographs (山 mountain), indicatives (上 up), compound ideographs (林 grove), and phono-semantic compounds — the largest group, where one part gives meaning and the other gives reading.

How many Japanese characters are there in total?

The official list for everyday use has 2,136 characters. Large dictionaries contain more than 50,000, but the vast majority are not used.

What are Japanese characters called and what types of writing exist

Japanese characters are called kanji (漢字) — 'Chinese characters'. In addition to them, Japanese has two syllabaries: hiragana (ひらがな) for grammar and katakana (カタカナ) for loanwords. All three systems work together in the same sentence, plus Latin romaji for signs and input.

Japanese text is written with three systems at once, and this is not redundancy but a division of labor: kanji carry meaning, hiragana glues grammar together, katakana marks everything that comes from outside. Readers distinguish them instantly — just as we distinguish italics and caps lock.

Three systems of Japanese writing

System	Example	Number of characters	Purpose
Kanji 漢字	山, 水, 愛	about 2,100 in the school list	word roots, meaning
Hiragana ひらがな	あ, の, を	46 basic	endings, particles, Japanese words
Katakana カタカナ	ア, ン, ジ	46 basic	loanwords, onomatopoeia, emphasis
Romaji ローマ字	sushi, Tokyo	Latin alphabet	signs, keyboard input

How they coexist in one sentence

Take 私はコーヒーを飲みます ('I drink coffee'). 私 and 飲 are kanji (meaning), は, を, みます are hiragana (grammar), コーヒー is katakana (borrowed 'coffee'). The change of system works as visual markup: word boundaries are visible without spaces, which Japanese does not have.

Why characters are called 'Chinese characters'

漢字 literally means 'characters of the Han dynasty': writing came to Japan from China around the 5th century via Korean states. The Japanese had no writing system of their own before that, so foreign characters were adapted to a language with a different structure — hence the multiple readings and both syllabaries that grew out of cursive forms of the same characters.

How many kanji you need to know

2,136 characters — 'jōyō kanji', the official list for everyday use, studied over 12 years of school.
About 1,000 is enough to read most everyday texts with occasional dictionary lookups.
For JLPT N5, about 100 characters are enough; for N1, around 2,000.
Additional characters are allowed in names — 'jinmeiyō kanji', about 860 more.

See how kanji is structured

Trace the character along the guides — the system will evaluate each stroke.

FAQ

What are Japanese characters called?: Kanji (漢字) — 'Chinese characters'. In addition, there are two syllabaries: hiragana and katakana, each with 46 basic characters.
Does Japanese use letters or characters?: Both. Kanji are characters (they convey meaning), hiragana and katakana are syllabaries where a sign equals a syllable, not a sound.
What types of Japanese characters are there?: By origin, kanji are divided into pictographs (山 mountain), indicatives (上 up), compound ideographs (林 grove), and phono-semantic compounds — the largest group, where one part gives meaning and the other gives reading.
How many Japanese characters are there in total?: The official list for everyday use has 2,136 characters. Large dictionaries contain more than 50,000, but the vast majority are not used.

Updated: 2026-07-25