You are right that Japanese as a language existed before Chinese writing system was introduced. Learning details of how this happened is fascinating when you kn

You are right that Japanese as a language existed before Chinese writing system was introduced. Learning details of how this happened is fascinating when you know some Japanese, it explains many of the quirks of the language, and why it's so complicated. I will try to make a summary. Chinese language was introduced mostly between 4th and 7th centuries [1]. Japanese had no writing system at that time, so they adopted Chinese ideograms (hanzi) and vocabulary, but changed the pronunciation to fit the much (much!) simpler Japanese phonetics. They also started to use the ideograms for words that already existed in Japanese, with their Japanese reading. That's why Japanese ideograms (kanji) have two kinds of readings: Chinese readings (onyomi) and Japanese readings (kunyomi). To make it even more complicated many kanji have multiple readings, and you have to learn which to use depending on the context or the word it's part of. Later some ideograms started to be used purely for their phonetic, ignoring the semantics, to better match Japanese grammar. With time these ideograms were simplified and they became two different syllabaries: hiragana [2] and katakana [3]. These are not ideograms, but letters that represent a full syllable. Hiragana is used for grammar particles, to spell out kanji and for some words. Katakana is used for borrowed foreign words, or sometimes as a sort of "italics", to emphasize words. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_influence_on_japanese_culture#Kanji:_Usage_of_Chinese_characters_in_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_influence_on_japanese_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana#Table_of_hiragana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana#Table_of_hiragana [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana#Table_of_katakana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana#Table_of_katakana