Lesson 3 - Japanese Writing Systems

The written Japanese is made up of three quite different writing systems: kanji, hiragana and katakana characters, which are used in combination.  In this blog, I'll use these three alphabets and the roman alphabet (mainly).

Katakana characters represent exactly the same sounds as hiragana alphabet, so in principle, all words can be written in katakana. But, In fact, we use katakana in the same way as we use italics, to write foreign words, exclamations, interjections and onomatopoeias.

Example of how kanji, hiragana and katakana are used together in a sentence:
Mike's school in is Yokohama.