Three Japanese Alphabets

First things first, Japanese uses three main scripts (or alphabets): kanji hiragana and katakana.

Kanji

Kanji (漢字) are adopted Chinese characters used in modern Japanese writing. Most Japanese words (nouns, adjectives and verbs) are written in kanji. There are no spaces in Japanese, so kanji helps distinguish when a new word begins. Kanji characters are symbols that represents words. Think of ♥ as a kanji character that represents “love”. 

Hiragana

Hiragana (ひらがな) is used mainly for grammatical purposes. If you wrote “♥ing” it’d be read as “loving”. In Japanese the suffix “-ing” would be written in hiragana. Participles, expressions, and words with extremely difficult or rare kanji are mostly written in hiragana. Hiragana characters are easy to identify because they’re usually a bit curvy and look simpler than kanji characters.

There are some cases where Japanese words use hiragana more often than kanji, such as sweet - かわいい (kawaii) or goodbye -さようなら (sayōnara).

Katakana

While katakana (カタカナ) represents the same sounds as hiragana, it’s mainly used to represent foreign words. Foreign names are represented in katakana, as are many foreign foods. Japan’s fun and quirky onomatopoeia appears in both katakana and hiragana. Katakana characters take a boxier form than hiragana characters do, and appear simpler than kanji. Every katakana character has a hiragana counterpart that makes the same sound.

Lady Gaga :レディー・ガガRedī gaga
Bon Jovi : ボン・ジョヴィBon jovu~i
John Smith : ジョン・スミスJon Sumisu

The small circle in between the previous names separates a first name from a last name (or separates two names) so Japanese readers can tell where a foreign name begins and ends.

American football : アメリカンフットボール Amerikanfuttobōru

*American football can also be called アメフト.

McDonald’s: マクドナルド Makudonarudo