how to write on japanese essay paper

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How to write sakubun.

Sakubun – writing (a paragraph, an essay, etc.), is an important part of teaching and learning Japanese. So Sakubun is considered a skill that is not easy to acquire for Japanese learners. In this post, Learn Japanese Daily will introduce to you the lesson: How to write Sakubun. Let’s start!

• 1.1 Sakubun meaning
• 1.2.1 How to write the title of Sakubun, your full name, school and class
• 1.2.2 The content of Sakubun
• 1.3 Japanese essay format

How to write Sakubun in Japanese

Sakubun meaning.

Sakubun (作文) is writing a paragraph, an essay, etc. in Japanese. When writing Sakubun, Japanese people will use a special type of paper called 原稿用紙 (Genkou youshi). This type of paper is divided into small squares for the sake of writing Sakubun easily. Genkou youshi is usually sold at 100 yen stores or at stationery stores in the schools.

How to use Genkou youshi (Japanese writing paper)

The most common 原稿用紙 (Genkou youshi) is the paper consisting of 20 lines on one side of that paper, and each line has 20 squares. So the total number of squares is 400.

There are rules when using Genkou youshi that writers need to know. The most basic way to use is to rotate the paper horizontally and write vertically from right to left. However, there are some Japanese language schools that allow students to to rotate the paper vertically and write horizontally from left to right. This post will guide you the first way (rotating the paper horizontally and writing vertically from right to left).

How to write the title of Sakubun, your full name, school and class

Before writing the content of Sakubun, you need to write your full name, your class and the title of Sakubun first.

Title: Write in the first line. Leave the first two or three squares blank (from top to bottom).

Full name: Write in the last squares in the second line, but you must leave the last square blank. There is one square between first name and last name.

School and class: It may or may not be written depending on the requirement. If you have to write, write in the second line (above the full name and there is one square between school – class and full name).

The content of Sakubun

– Leave the first square blank and start writing from the second square. When moving to the next paragraph, you also need to leave the first square blank and start writing from the second square.

– Commas, dots, question marks, exclamation points, and quotation marks are like a letter, so each of them is written in a single square. However, when these marks may appear at the beginning of a new line, you need to write them in the same square with the letter immediately preceding them in the old line (or write them in the margin at the bottom of the old line), in order to avoid these marks start a new line.

– For conversation sentences, dots and quotation marks are written in the same square. If the sentence is needed to be written in 2 or more lines, leave the first square blank and then write from the second square.

– Small letters such as っ、ゃ、ゅ、ょ are also written in a single square.

– The digits must be written in Kanji: 一, 二, 三, 万 v…v….

– If you need to write the numbers (0,1,2, etc.), write two numbers horizontally in the same square.

– With Alphabet letters, two lowercase letters can be written horizontally in the same square, and each capital letter can be written vertically in a single square.

Japanese essay format

You can write Sakubun according to the 4-part structure 起承転結, including: 起 – introduction, 承 – development, 転 – turn, 結 – conclusion.

Or you can write Sakubun according to the 3-part structure – 三段構成 (Sandan kousei), including: 序 – opening, 破 – body, 急 – conclusion.

To understand more about the way of writing as well as the structure of Sakubun, you can refer to some samples of Sakubun on different topics at category : Japanese essay .

Above is: How to write Sakubun. Hope this post can help you improve your writing skills. Wish you all good study!

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Mastering The Art Of Japanese Essay Writing: A How-To Guide

Essay writing in Japanese can be both challenging and rewarding. Whether you’re a student striving for academic excellence or an enthusiast looking to express yourself fluently in Japanese, honing your essay-writing skills is crucial. From crafting compelling arguments to mastering the intricacies of grammar and style, there are several strategies you can employ to improve your Japanese essay writing. In this guide, we’ll explore some effective techniques to help you elevate your writing to the next level.

1. Expand your vocabulary

Building a strong vocabulary is fundamental to effective essay writing in any language, including Japanese. Make a habit of learning new words regularly and incorporating them into your writing. Utilise flashcards, language learning apps, and reading extensively to expose yourself to a wide range of vocabulary. Additionally, pay attention to kanji and their various readings, as they can significantly enhance your writing proficiency.

2. Practice writing regularly

Like any skill, Japanese essay writing requires consistent practice to improve. Set aside dedicated time each day to write essays on different topics. Start with simple subjects and gradually increase the complexity as you gain confidence. Don’t shy away from seeking feedback from native speakers or instructors to identify areas for improvement.

3. Focus on grammar and syntax

Paying attention to grammar and syntax is essential for producing coherent and polished essays. Review grammar rules regularly and practise applying them in your writing. Take note of common mistakes and strive to avoid them in your essays. Additionally, analyse well-written Japanese essays to observe how native speakers construct sentences and convey their ideas effectively.

4. Develop strong arguments

Whether you’re writing an opinion piece or an analytical essay, developing strong arguments is crucial. Take the time to brainstorm and organise your thoughts before writing. Clearly outline your main points and provide supporting evidence to strengthen your arguments. Consider using rhetorical devices and persuasive language to engage your readers and make your essay more compelling.

5. Read Japanese literature

Reading Japanese literature is not only enjoyable but also beneficial for improving your essay-writing skills. Expose yourself to a variety of literary works, including novels, essays, and articles, to familiarise yourself with different writing styles and techniques. Pay attention to how authors structure their essays, develop characters, and evoke emotions through language.

6. Edit and revise

Effective editing and revision are essential steps in the essay writing process. After completing a draft, take a break and then revisit your essay with fresh eyes. Look for grammatical errors, awkward phrasing, and inconsistencies in your writing. Consider seeking feedback from peers or mentors to gain valuable insights into areas for improvement. Revise your essay multiple times until you’re satisfied with the final result.

7. Immerse yourself in the language

Immersing yourself in the Japanese language and culture can significantly enhance your essay-writing skills. Watch popular Japanese TV shows , listen to Japanese music, and engage in conversations with native speakers whenever possible. Immerse yourself in authentic Japanese content to absorb idiomatic expressions, colloquialisms, and cultural nuances that will enrich your writing.

In conclusion, improving your Japanese essay writing skills requires dedication, practice, and a willingness to learn. By expanding your vocabulary, practising regularly, focusing on grammar and syntax, developing strong arguments, reading Japanese literature, editing, and revising your work, and immersing yourself in the language, you can make significant strides in your writing proficiency. Remember that mastery takes time and effort, so be patient with yourself and celebrate your progress along the way.

For further guidance and resources on Japanese language learning, consider exploring Japanese Explorer’s comprehensive Japanese classes. With our expert instruction and tailored curriculum, you can learn Japanese with ease and accelerate your journey toward fluency and proficiency in Japanese essay writing.

So, what are you waiting for? Enrol in a Japanese lesson in Singapore with us today!

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Japanese Writing Practice: Ultimate List of Resources for Every Level

Japanese writing can be one of the scariest aspects of learning Japanese! And there’s no shortcut to success – you simply have to get your Japanese writing practice in . Luckily there are no shortage of tools to help you with this!

Whether you are a beginner looking to practise your Japanese handwriting, or an advanced student in need of Japanese essay writing practice, there are lots of free and cheap resources out there at every level.

Here’s my roundup of the best websites, apps, printables and other tools for Japanese writing practice.

Japanese writing practice apps

Free websites for japanese writing practice online.

Easy Japanese writing practice for beginners

Japanese hiragana and katakana writing practice.

If you are new to learning Japanese, you’ll want to get your hiragana and katakana down pat before you move on to anything else.

Spending time on your hiragana and katakana writing practice not only helps you memorise the characters, it will also improve your handwriting and help you become accustomed to correct stroke order, which will be a massive benefit when you move on to learning kanji !

There are loads of free Japanese katakana and hiragana writing practice sheets online for you to download and print at home. Here’s a selection:

Free Japanese hiragana and katakana writing practice sheets pdf workbook

This free workbook from JapanesePod101 introduces all the hiragana and katakana characters and has spaces for you to trace, and then copy them out. The workbook also contains flashcards to practise your recognition. Note: you need to create a free account to access the workbook.

Japanese hiragana writing practice sheets

An alternative source to print out hiragana practice sheets, with grid lines to help your handwriting.

Japanese katakana writing practice sheets

An alternative source to print out katakana practice sheets, with grid lines to help your handwriting.

Free BLANK Japanese writing practice sheets

If you just want blank Japanese graph paper to practise writing out your characters, I have created my own in various sizes/formats for you to download and print!

Kakikata print maker

An awesome website (designed for Japanese parents/teachers to use with their children) where you can design and print your own worksheets with kana or kanji characters of your choice, in various formats. You can even choose to add stroke order! Useful if you want to practise a particular word or set of characters.

Japanese Tools: create your own kana practice sheets

Here is another useful site where you can create your own Japanese practice writing sheets with the characters of your choice, printed with a gradual fade to trace/copy.

Japanese kanji writing practice

If you are studying kanji from a textbook or course and you just need blank kanji graph paper to practise writing on, you can print that out here .

If you are looking for pre-printed kanji worksheets with kanji to copy out, the best resource I have found is this one:

This amazing website lets you download and print kanji writing practice worksheets for kanji sets according to JLPT level, Japanese school grade level, Wanikani level, Kanji Garden app level, or frequency. It’s totally free and so useful!

Easy Japanese sentence writing practice

Once you know your kana and a few kanji, you might start to think about writing out some Japanese sentences.

JapanesePod101 writing practice worksheets 

JapanesePod101 has a selection of free Japanese writing practice sheets, available as pdfs that you can download and print yourself. They currently have 16+ free writing practice workbooks on beginner-friendly topics such as daily routine or ordering food. This is a good way to get used to writing out simple Japanese sentences at the beginner level. 

However, I wouldn’t recommend them for complete beginners because they use kanji – so you should be familiar with some kanji and the basic rules of stroke order before you use them.

As soon as you are able to form Japanese sentences on your own, I recommend you start a Japanese journal and/or sharing your sentences with others using the resources in the intermediate/advanced section below!

When you are learning to write in Japanese, I recommend writing them out by hand as much as possible because it helps you learn by muscle memory and helps you develop neat handwriting! However, it’s also useful to have a great writing practice app or two on your phone so you can study on the go.

There are lots of great apps out there to practise writing Japanese characters. Here are some recommendations:

Skritter is an app for learning Japanese (and Chinese) writing and vocabulary. You can use Skritter to learn kana and kanji from scratch, or simply to review what you’ve learned. It uses handwriting recognition and a spaced repetition system (SRS) to help you learn effectively.

Under the ‘test’ settings section you can choose to focus on writing only, or add in flashcards for reading and definition too.

It works well alongside other courses and textbooks to practise your characters. They have pre-made flashcard decks from various textbooks which is great when you get on to drilling vocabulary.

As with Skritter, you can either use this app to learn kana and kanji as a complete beginner, or just to practise writing the characters you already know. In fact, it’s probably the best app I’ve found if you just want a simple flashcard-style writing practice app with handwriting recognition. It’s a little clunkier to use but once you’ve got it set up, it’s easy. If you already know the kana and you just want to practise, choose ‘Yes, but I need more practice’ during the set-up stage.

The Scripts app from the makers of Drops teaches you kana and kanji (and also has the option to learn other languages’ scripts, such as hangul or hanzi, if you’re doing the polyglot thing). You learn by tracing the characters with your finger on the screen.

It’s a good option if you are learning to write the Japanese characters from scratch. However, I could not see an option to skip the ‘learning’ stage and just review, so if you’ve already mastered your kana it won’t be for you.

Learn Japanese! 

This is a very simple and easy to use app to learn how to write hiragana and katakana. However, you only learn 5 characters at a time and I couldn’t see a way to skip to review only, so again, great for complete beginners but not if you just want to practise.

Intermediate and advanced Japanese writing practice

At the intermediate and advanced levels, you are well beyond copying out characters/sentences on worksheets, and you will be creating your own compositions in Japanese. In fact, I highly recommend doing this as soon as you are able to! 

One popular method to get your Japanese writing practice is to keep a daily diary or journal in Japanese . You can try to incorporate new grammar and vocabulary you’ve learned, or simply write whatever comes into your head just to get used to writing in Japanese.

Even jotting down a few private sentences in your own notebook will be beneficial. But if you want to step it up a notch, use one of the websites/apps below to share your writing with other learners and native speakers and receive feedback.

If you’ve been studying languages for a while you might be mourning the loss of Lang8, a site where you could post journal entries in your target language online and get feedback from native speakers. Here are a couple of Lang 8 alternatives I’ve found:

LangCorrect

LangCorrect is a site where you can practise your Japanese writing online by writing daily journal entries and getting corrections from native speakers. It’s fairly active with the Japanese learning community, and you can usually expect to get a few comments/corrections within a few hours (don’t forget to take the time difference into account!). They also have journal prompts in case you’re feeling the writer’s block. It’s free to use.

Journaly is a similar site I’ve heard, about although I haven’t used it and I have the impression its user base is smaller than LangCorrect. It’s free to use and there is also a paid version which has a few extra benefits, such as bumping up your posts to get more attention.

This is a free website offered by Dickinson College. Its main purpose is for connecting language exchange partners, but they also have a feature where you can post writing samples to receive corrections from native speakers.

r/WriteStreakJP

This subreddit is a forum to practise writing in Japanese. It’s for anyone at any level who wants to practise their Japanese writing. The idea is that you write something every day to build up a ‘streak’ and build the habit of writing in Japanese regularly.

You can write whatever you feel like; many people write diary-like entries about their day, or share random thoughts, or write about something new they’ve learned etc. There are native Japanese speaking mods who drop by to correct mistakes.

There are a lot more learners than native speakers on the forum, though, so unfortunately you’re not guaranteed feedback. But it’s still a great place to practise writing (and reading!) Japanese.

HelloTalk is a language exchange app where you can connect with Japanese native speakers, chat via text, voice or video call and receive feedback on your Japanese. In addition to connecting with people directly, you can also create ‘moments’ (write posts such as sharing journal entries, or pictures of your day) and ask general questions, and receive comments/feedback from other users.

Be warned, recently I hear a lot of users complaining that people use the messaging function like a dating app – but you may have better success using the ‘moments’ function or messaging people yourself first.

Another language exchange app where you can exchange text messages with a Japanese-speaking partner and receive corrections.

HiNative  

On HiNative you can ask questions about language usage and get feedback from native speakers. You can write your questions either in Japanese or English. This question/answer service is free. Premium paid members can also post diary entries to get feedback.

More resources for Japanese writing practice

Here’s a mixture of other useful tools and resources I’ve found for Japanese writing practice that don’t fit neatly into the above categories! This section contains a mixture of free and paid resources.

Japanese water calligraphy practice kits (paid)

Why not go old-school and practise your Japanese characters with a real calligraphy brush! In Japan, students often practise their calligraphy with these nifty ‘magic’ kits, where you paint with water on the special water-activated paper, which fades away after a few minutes so you can reuse it time and time again. This is a fun way to refine your Japanese handwriting while reviewing the characters!

Printable Japanese journals with writing prompts (paid) 

I found this printable Japanese journaling/writing practice kit on Etsy. It contains dozens of writing prompts at the beginner, intermediate and advanced levels, so you’ve got no excuse not to jot down a few sentences in Japanese every day! Check out the other great resources by the same author.

Japanese planner templates (free)

If you want to take daily notes or plan your day/week in Japanese, this site has loads of free Japanese planner templates to print out.

Japanese writing practice notebooks (paid)

The paper used in Japan for school compositions/essay writing practice is called genkouyoushi . There are lots of genkouyoushi notebooks with cute cover designs available on Amazon.

Free printable genkouyoushi (Japanese composition paper)

Alternatively, you can print out your own genkouyoushi-style blank writing sheets here for free.

Japanese sentence/usage databases

These databases are useful tools that I often use when writing in Japanese to check how words are used. You can search for a Japanese word and see it in context of many authentic, native Japanese sentences, to get an idea of correct and natural usage. You can also use them for sentence mining , if that’s your thing.

• Reverso – my favourite. Need to create a free account to see all sentences.
• Natsume – see how often a word is used, and which particles and other words usually follow it
• Sentence search with audio

How to Write Japanese Essays book (paid)

If you are studying Japanese to a very high level, for example to enter a Japanese university or company, you will need Japanese essay writing practice. The book How to Write Japanese Essays comes highly recommended and will train you to write in the formal academic style that is taught in Japan.

Japanese writing practice roundup

Which tools and resources do you use for Japanese writing practice? If you know any I’ve missed out, please share in the comments!

See these related posts for more useful resources to learn Japanese:

• Japanese Writing Paper: FREE Printable Blank Japanese Writing Sheets
• FREE Websites for Japanese Reading Practice (At Every Level)
• 10+ Effective Ways to Get Japanese Speaking Practice (Even if You Study By Yourself!)
• Where to get Your Japanese Listening Practice: The Epic List of Resources!
• The Ultimate List of Japanese Podcasts for Listening Practice (Beginner / Intermediate / Advanced)
• Best YouTube Channels to Learn Japanese {20+ Japanese YouTubers!}

Rebecca Shiraishi-Miles

Rebecca is the founder of Team Japanese. She spent two years teaching English in Ehime, Japan. Now back in the UK, she spends her time blogging, self-studying Japanese and wrangling a very genki toddler.

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How to Write Japanese Essays

Product Description

A new and revised edition of this book is now available here: How to Write Japanese Essays - 2nd Edition

If you are planning to study at a Japanese University or work at a Japanese company, your Japanese writing skills will need to be at an academic level. This book is a good guide for writing essays/papers in Japanese. It offers help with essay structure, from the first paragraph right through to the summary. It also teaches correct punctuation and quotation use, in addition to the construction of explanations. You will also learn suitable vocabulary/expressions to use in essays/papers; these are often very different from casual writing and spoken Japanese. It will also help you to improve your spoken Japanese for formal situations. The book includes a lot of practice essays and sections for you to test yourself with. This book is aimed at upper-intermediate to advanced learners. 122 pages language: Japanese

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