Kids Web Japan

c) Three

Japanese has three types of characters: kanji, hiragana, and katakana. Japanese is written by combining these three character types. Kanji characters, which each have their own meanings, came to Japan from China long, long ago. Hiragana and katakana are simpler characters that represent sounds only. They are derived from kanji and evolved into their present form over many hundreds of years. There are 46 hiragana and 46 katakana. Kanji, on the other hand, are much more numerous. There are around 2,000 commonly used kanji characters, and there are currently about 7,000 kanji that can be expressed using a Japanese computer. First-year elementary students learn hiragana, katakana, and about 80 kanji characters. (The picture of a face on the Kids Web homepage is made up of hiragana.)

Ancient documents like historical literature were all written vertically, from top to bottom. Nowadays, though, many books are printed horizontally, from left to right. Today's elementary and junior high school textbooks are also printed horizontally, except for Japanese language textbooks, and most kids write horizontally in their notebooks.