Japanese uses three native scripts in addition to Latin (called romaji), and mixes them all together.

Top right on the slide is an example of ideographic characters, borrowed from Chinese, which in Japanese are called kanji. Kanji characters are used principally for the roots of words.

The example at the top left of the slide is written entirely in hiragana. Hiragana is a native Japanese syllabic script typically used for many indigenous Japanese words (as in this case) and for grammatical particles and endings. The example at the bottom of the slide shows its use to express grammatical information alongside a kanji character (the darker, initial character) that expresses the root meaning of the word.

Japanese everyday usage requires around 2,000 kanji characters – although Japanese character sets include many thousands more.