This course is designed for you to teach yourself to learn to read and write Japanese efficiently. It provides all the characters introduced in the eSUN courses.

The Japanese writing system uses three different sets of characters: katakana, hiragana and kanji (Chinese characters). The first two of these are relatively easy as each character represents one mora (a Japanese sound unit); in other words, these two scripts are made up of phonetic symbols. Kanji, however, are not so easy, because the "common use" kanji in modern Japanese number almost 2,000. In fact, the number itself is not too bad, compared with the number of vocabulary words used in any language. The difficulty lies in how to read the kanji, as very many of them have at least two readings. These two readings are called the on reading (based on the original Chinese sound) and the kun reading (a Japanese word corresponding to the character's original meaning). In addition, there are large numbers of words made up of a combination of two or more kanji, creating more complex vocabulary items, some of which have unpredictable readings.

This course contains worksheets as well for those of you who wish to practice how to handwrite Japanese characters. You have all you need to master all the katakana and hiragana, but not all the kanji. Indeed, even well educated Japanese natives find themselves reaching for the dictionary now and then. Here we provide all the kanji used in the eSUN courses and other characters as an introduction. We hope this course will help you with your reading and writing skills.