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One Language, Four Scripts
You will encounter three kinds of writing in Japanese texts: romaji, hiragana, katakana, and kanji. To give you a taste of how different these scripts are, the Japanese word for "cat" is written below in all four varieties:
This essay explores the function of each script, and explains how the scripts work together in written Japanese.
The Romaji Paradox
From the perspective of a native English-speaker, the most accessible Japanese script is romaji. Romaji is simply Japanese sounds rendered in the Roman (Latin) alphabet that is used in most Western European languages. Romaji is commonly employed in beginning Japanese textbooks, as well as in dictionaries and language reference texts. Here is an example sentence written in romaji:
Sumisu-san wa Mitsubishi ni tsutomete imasu.
(Mr. Smith is employed at Mitsubishi.)
If you read the above sentence written as it is written in romaji, you will be understood by speakers of Japanese. Anyone who has tried to learn Thai or Arabic will appreciate what this means. Some non-European languages - most notably Arabic and Thai - contain sounds that can only be approximated by the Latin alphabet. However, the phonetic range of the Japanese language can be rendered more or less accurately through the alphabet that is already familiar to speakers of English, Spanish, French, and German.
On the other hand, if the above sentence had been penned or typed by a native Japanese-speaker, it would look like this:
An obvious question arises at this point. If romaji is a phonetically acceptable vehicle for Japanese, then why not just use romaji for written communications in the language, and skip learning the more exotic scripts altogether?
First of all, complete sentences written in romaji are difficult for Japanese to decipher. All Japanese can read the Latin alphabet, and competently sound out words written in romaji; but they are not accustomed to reading entire sentences of Romanized Japanese. In Japanese texts, Latin letters are mainly limited to acronyms of Western origin (ex: OK, DVD, Mr., CD, etc.). They are especially prevalent in the technical fields. Look at any Japanese-language technical manual, and you will see familiar acronyms peppered throughout the Japanese script.
But why don't the Japanese use romaji, if it works for their language phonetically? After all, compared to the scripts the Japanese struggle with, the Latin alphabet is vastly easier to learn.
At various points in Japanese history, romaji advocates known as romaji-ronsha have argued that Japan should convert to a Latin-based writing system. During the Allied Occupation of Japan following World War II, the Allies made a brief and abortive attempt to "reform" the complex Japanese language through the Romanization of its written form.
The various romaji movements have never caught on because of the significance of the kanji: these characters (which were originally borrowed from Chinese) convey meaning as well as pronunciation. Japanese has numerous homonyms (words that have the same pronunciation but different meanings); and the kanji enable readers to distinguish between them.
For example, there are three common homonyms that are are pronounced shoohin:
Aside from context, the only way of distinguishing between these words is by discerning the meaning of the first kanji character of each one.
The kanji also allow readers to extrapolate the meanings of unfamiliar vocabulary items. Consider the following word, yookyoku:
This is not an extremely difficult word - but it's not an extremely common one, either. Now let's suppose that you have just come across it for the first time. How are you going to figure it out?
The first kanji character, yoo, means "positive." This character also appears in the following Japanese words:
The second character, kyoku, means "pole." Kyoku appears in the familiar words that signify the earth's northern and southern poles:
Therefore, when you combine, yoo and kyoku, you obtain the meaning "positive pole" or "anode"--a term which will be familiar to anyone who has studied electronics.
None of this extrapolation would have been possible with the romaji equivalent, yookyoku, (or even the hiragana version, for that matter).
The meanings conveyed by the kanji are indispensable when one is reading complicated texts. In this way, the kanji are analogous to the Greek and Latin roots that enable English-speakers to competently handle words like "patricide" and "telephony" without too much trepidation.