Your first kanji

Japanese is written with three scripts at the same time, and you already have two of them. Hiragana and katakana each carry a fixed set of sounds and nothing else, so a kana tells you how to say something but never what it means. The third script, kanji, works the other way round: a character carries a meaning, and how you pronounce it depends on the word it happens to be sitting in.

Why a third script

Japanese is written without spaces between words, so something has to show a reader where one word stops and the next starts. Kanji do that job. Content words are written with kanji, the grammatical glue around them stays in hiragana, and the eye picks out the shape of a sentence from the alternation of dense characters and light ones. A sentence written entirely in kana is perfectly legal and noticeably slower to read.

Kanji also pull apart words that sound alike. Japanese has a small stock of syllables and a great many homophones: かみ is paper, hair and god, and only the written form tells you which one is meant. There is a longer-term payoff too. Once you recognise a few dozen characters, words you have never met start to explain themselves, because you can read their parts.

Two kinds of reading

Characters came to Japan from China carrying both a meaning and a Chinese pronunciation. Japanese already had its own spoken word for most of those meanings, and rather than choose between them, the language kept both. That is why nearly every kanji has two families of reading.

The on reading (音読おんよみ) is the imported one, a Japanese approximation of how the character sounded in Chinese a very long time ago. The kun reading (訓読くんよみ) is the native Japanese word the character was matched to. 山やま means mountain either way: read さん it is the borrowed sound, read やま it is the ordinary Japanese word for the thing.

A rule of thumb gets you a long way here. A kanji standing on its own, or trailed by hiragana, is usually read with its kun reading. Two or more kanji packed together are usually read with their on readings.

A character standing alone

When a single kanji is a whole word by itself, reach for the kun reading first.

これは本ほんです kore wa hon desu This is a book

あれは川かわです are wa kawa desu That over there is a river

あの人ひとはだれですか ano hito wa dare desu ka Who is that person?

Characters in a compound

Push two characters together and the reading usually flips to the on side. 日にち plus 本ほん gives 日本にほん, the origin of the sun, which is what the country calls itself, and adding 人じん makes a person of that country. 大だい plus 学がく is a big place of learning, so a university, and 生せい on the end makes one of its students.

たなかさんは日本人にほんじんです tanaka-san wa nihonjin desu Tanaka is Japanese

私わたしは大学生だいがくせいです watashi wa daigakusei desu I am a university student

やまもとさんは先生せんせいです yamamoto-san wa sensei desu Yamamoto is a teacher

Personal names are the great exception to all of this. They mix the two kinds of reading freely, and a surname nobody has seen before can genuinely stump a native speaker, which is why business cards so often print the reading in kana above the characters.

The kana tail

Verbs and adjectives change their endings, and a character cannot change shape, so the changing part is written in hiragana straight after the kanji. That trailing kana is called okurigana. In 読よみます the character carries the meaning "read" and the reading よ, while みます is the polite ending you already know. The kanji holds the meaning still while the tail does the grammar.

私わたしは本ほんを読よみます watashi wa hon o yomimasu I read books

たなかさんはてがみを書かきます tanaka-san wa tegami o kakimasu Tanaka writes a letter

まいばんテレビを見みます maiban terebi o mimasu I watch television every evening

When there are more than two

Some characters collect readings the way an old house collects furniture. 生せい is the worst offender you will meet early on: せい in 学生がくせい, しょう in a handful of older compounds, and a whole family of native readings in the verbs for living and being born. 本ほん is ほん in 日本にほん and in the word for book, but もと in the surname やまもと.

The way through is not to memorise readings in lists. Learn words, and let the readings arrive attached to them. After a hundred words the pattern starts to feel obvious, and you find yourself guessing new compounds correctly without being able to say why.

Your first kanji

Each character below is shown with one common reading over it. The two reading columns give the fuller picture, and a bracketed tail marks where okurigana would begin.

Write each of them by hand a few times before moving on. Strokes run top to bottom and left to right, and a character built in the standard order simply looks right in a way that a copied shape does not.

Vocabulary

Twenty-four characters is not many, and yet they already cover the numbers, the days of the month, a good handful of nouns and the stems of three verbs. From here on, words appear in kanji with the reading printed above them, so you are never stuck. Next you will take the verbs you have and move them into the past, and into the negative.