There are four different character sets used for Japanese: hiragana, katakana, romaji, and kanji. Hiragana and katakana both contain less than fifty characters and are purely phonetic writing systems. They can be used interchangeably, but usually hiragana is used for text and katakana is used for loanwords or special emphasis, like italics in English text. Romaji are simply the familiar letters you're reading right now. It is the last character set, kanji, that motivated this article.

These characters, mostly borrowed from Chinese, relate to meanings, not sounds. There are over 6000 kanji in all, but in 1946 the Japanese ministry of education settled on a list of 1945 characters for common use and 166 for names. Most kanji have at least two readings: on and kun. Which reading is used depends on the context, but usually the Japanese (kun) reading is used for single kanji and the Chinese (on) reading is used for compounds.

character	common readings	meaning
	OO(kii) TAI- -DAI-	large
	NAKA CHUU-	middle
	SIN ATARA(shii)	new

Japanese verbs and adjectives are usually written with kanji for the stem and hiragana for the ending. The format of kanji dictionary entries usually includes the readings in hiragana or katakana.