In today’s Japanese, several different scripts are used in combination with each other:

* Kanji (the traditional Chinese signs that look almost like pictograms)
* Hiragana (a syllabic script)
* Katakana (another syllabary)
* Romaji (the Roman alphabet)

In a typical Japanese text, Kanji characters are used to express the semantic aspect of Japanese (i.e. the “content” words, in particular nouns and stems of verbs and adjectives), while grammatical relationships (such as tense, aspect, negation or affirmation etc) are added in Hiragana. Hiragana is also used if a word doesn’t have a kanji or if the kanji is unusual or difficult to read, or as a transliteration system to familiarize children and foreigners with the correct pronunciation of the kanji.

The other syllabic script, Katakana, is limited to transcribing foreign words and names, while Romaji (i.e. the Latin alphabet) is mostly used for acronyms as well as in texts written by or for foreigners who are unfamiliar with Japanese scripts.

Although most Shodo classes seem to focus mostly on Kanji, the artistic writing of Hiragana and Katakana is also part of Japanese calligraphy. Most non-Japanese shodo students learn to write their names in Katakana  already during their first shodo class so that they can put it on all the practice samples they submit to their teacher for correction and feedback.

Japanese Kanji characters can be written in several different styles. The most important of them are Kaisho (or square style), Gyosho (or half-cursive style), and Sosho (cursive style).