In this 5 minute tutorial I will teach you about the Japanese writing system by using Naruto characters (in many senses of the word) as examples.

As you might know, the Japanese language has three different alphabets: Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. The word "Naruto" is written using Katakana as "NA" "RU" "TO". You can see each Katakana character actually makes a whole syllable. Note how the Katakana characters look very angular with sharp turns. That is their distinctive feature.

To get an example of Hiragana, let's see how "Uzumaki Naruto" is written. In this case, both Hiragana and Katakana are used, with the Naruto characters written as before, but "Uzumaki" written in Hiragana. Characters can be written either from left to right as with English, or from top to bottom. Let's see "Uzumaki Naruto" in a left-to-right manner. From left to right the characters read first "U-ZU-MA-KI" in Hiragana, then the familiar "NA-RU-TO" in katakana. See the two dots over "ZU"? Without them that character would be "SU", so the dots change the sound slightly. Such sound-changing marks are used a lot in both Hiragana and Katakana, but not in Kanji.

As another Hiragana-Katakana combination example, take "Uchiha Sasuke". "U-CHI-HA" is written in Hiragana, and "SA-SU-KE" in katakana. Notice how the feel of Hiragana and Katakana is quite different. Perhaps from now on you will be able to recognize the difference when you see Japanese characters somewhere. On important thing is still missing though, namely you haven't seen any Kanji characters yet.

This reads "Haruno Sakura", with "HARU-NO" in Kanji and "SA-KU-RA" in Katakana. Kanji is where it gets interesting. While Hiragana and Katakana represent sounds, Kanji characters represent whole ideas. This might be a mind-bending concept if you haven't studied a foreign language that uses ideograms, but with a kanji character you can't even be sure how to read it out loud if you don't know what context it is in, since it is a representation of an idea, not a sound.

The left character is "HARU", it means "spring" (the season). In some other context that same character might be read "SHUN". As a weak analogy, consider the character . In some context you might read that character as "Male", but it wouldn't be too hard to imagine that it could be read as "Man". Both names for the character would be equally correct. The second character in the Kanji means "field", so the whole thing means "spring field".

Another aspect that makes Kanji interesting is the sheer volume of them. While there are only about a hundred Katakana and Hiragana, there are thousands of Kanji. If you are considering studying Japanese this might depress you a bit, but as consolation the characters are built up from smaller parts, so they are not all completely different, which makes studying them a bit easier.

I hope you learned something from the Naruto characters. If you feel like continuing your study of Japanese, I would suggest trying to memorize the Hiragana characters. After mastering those you could continue to Katakana and Kanji.