The Japanese writing system

Modern Japanese writes with a mix of three scripts. Every N5 learner needs to recognise and produce all of them, because N5 test material mixes them freely.

Script	Type	Used for	N5 expectation
ひらがな (hiragana)	syllabary, 46 base characters	grammatical endings (okurigana), particles, native words	read and write all of it
カタカナ (katakana)	syllabary, 46 base characters	loanwords, foreign names, onomatopoeia	read and write the common loanwords in the N5 vocabulary set
漢字 (kanji)	logographic characters	content words (nouns, verb/adjective stems)	the 103-character N5 study set

Hiragana and katakana

• Each character is a syllable (a vowel, or consonant + vowel; ん is a nasal).
• The two syllabaries map to the same sounds: か = カ = ka.
• Diacritics change sounds: が (ga), ぱ (pa). Small ゃ/ゅ/ょ make palatalised sounds (きゃ = kya). A long vowel is written with ー in katakana (コーヒー) or a repeated vowel in hiragana (おかあさん).
• っ (small tsu) doubles the following consonant: きって (stamp).

Kanji

• One kanji usually has at least two readings: an on'yomi (Chinese-derived, written in katakana in dictionaries) and a kun'yomi (native Japanese, written in hiragana).
• Okurigana are the hiragana after a kanji that carry the grammatical ending: 食べる (食べる) — the kanji 食 carries the meaning, べる is okurigana.
• When a kanji is written smaller or beside a word it may carry furigana (reading aid) — common in children's books and some test glosses.
• The N5 kanji page in this knowledge base lists, per kanji, the readings actually exercised by N5 vocabulary — learn kanji through words, not as isolated reading lists.

Punctuation and formatting notes

• The Japanese comma is 、 and the full stop is 。. Question marks are usually omitted; the particle か marks a question.
• Quotation marks are 「」, and the dot ・ separates items in a list.
• Long vowel marks (ー) in katakana loanwords are part of the spelling.

Related

• N5 kanji — the 103-character study set with example words
• N5 reading expectations — what N5 reading sections assume
• N5 vocabulary — vocabulary entries carry readings in hiragana/katakana