I've been studying Japanese on my own for only three days. Why does the word
"Japanese" sometimes appear like this **日本人** and also like this **にほんじん**?
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2023-03-26T06:52:46.423
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kanji hiragana spelling
Is it 日本人 or にほんじん?
Both are correct. 日本人 is the word for 'Japanese (person)' written in
**kanji**. にほんじん is exactly the same word but written in **hiragana**. Adults
normally use the kanji version (日本人), but にほんじん appears in beginners'
textbooks because it's easier to learn at first.

Japanese is a language where three types of scripts are used in one sentence.
For an introduction, please read the following articles:

  * [Wikipedia - Japanese writing system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_writing_system)
  * <https://guidetojapanese.org/learn/category/grammar-guide/the-writing-system/>
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answer
The Japanese language uses 3 different writing systems:

  * kanji, which was originally borrowed from Chinese ideograms: they represent a “picture” of a word, related to the meaning of the word, but not to its pronunciation, for instance, 人 represents a person, which is really easy to memorize since it does look like a bust with two legs,
  * hiragana, a monosyllabic (one character is a syllable - eg. “ka”, “to”, etc.) alphabet used to write mostly prepositions, verb endings, etc. As an “alphabet”, it focuses on pronunciation only, unrelated to the meaning, and you can write absolutely everything in hiragana if you don't know the correct kanji, but Japanese people are used to writing a lot of words with kanji rather than hiragana since it is easier/faster to read/write once you know the meaning of those,
  * katakana, another monosyllabic alphabet, which is graphically very similar to hiragana (it is less round and has more sharp edges), generally used to write words that are not strictly Japanese as well as a few other uses (for instance of foreign origin like アメリカ = “America”, or various onomatopoeias, etc.).

So, 日本人 is the ideogram version of the word “Japanese person”. However, when
you learn the language, you have no idea how to pronounce this series of
characters. You have to learn all the “kanji”, their pronunciation, and their
meaning, and there are thousands of them! Note that one “kanji” can have
several meanings, can be combined with other characters to form different
meanings as well, and can even be pronounced differently depending on the
context. 日本人 is actually pronounced “Nihon-jin”. The first letter is the sun,
the second is “origin” and the third is a person - which as I mentioned you
can recognize with its two legs. But the first character can also mean “day”
(pronounced “hi”). And the character 本 on its own is also a book.

On the other hand, にほんじん is the hiragana version. In this version, once you
learn the alphabet, you can immediately pronounce it, even if you have no idea
what it means. As there are only a limited number of characters in the
alphabet, it is quite easy to learn, which is why manuals for beginners
generally use hiragana pretty much everywhere, rather than confusing learners
with hundreds of kanji. Sometimes, you'll also find the double version: a
large kanji version along with the hiragana version above or under it so that
you can learn and memorize the kanji's pronunciation:

[![Nihonjin in kanji and
hiragana](https://i.stack.imgur.com/EVmTH.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/EVmTH.jpg)
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answer
There is ニッポン人 (nipponjin), too. They are spelling and pronunciation
variations of the same word.

When you write normally, it's 日本人. The rest is used for special purposes.
にほんじん, ニホンジン, にっぽんじん, ニッポンジン - these spelling are used only when you want to
discuss the reading, especially in ruby annotation. ニホン人 and ニッポン人 are a bit
different - these are still abnormal but can deliver the effect of emphasizing
that you are discussing Japanese from an outsider's perspective or in relation
to the rest of the world. The book title
[不思議な不思議なニッポン人](https://iss.ndl.go.jp/books/R100000002-I000001813198-00) seems
like a typical example of the last point. (I could be wrong, I haven't read
the book.)
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