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🌊 SCIENCE · Japan explained · 2026-08-06

Why is the sea salty? The answer, in simple Japanese at six kanji levels

Same news, rewritten for 6 Japanese school grades — pick your level below. Furigana + translation included.
168 chars · ~3 min · 18 kanji
🌊 SCIENCE うみ
Same sentence · 6 levels

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うみみずを なめると しょっぱい あじが する。

その もとは、りくの いわはいって いる しおだ。

やまに ふった あめいわすこしずつ とかし、しおを かわながす。

かわみずは やがて うみあつまる。

太陽たいよううみみずを あたためると、みずだけが そらくもに なる。

しおは うみに のこる ため、なが年月としつきあいだうみは しおからく なった。

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0 kanji you have met today Kept only in this browser — it disappears when you close the tab. Keep my progress
Translation

If you taste sea water, it has a salty flavour.

Its source is the salt held inside the rocks on land.

Rain falling on the mountains dissolves the rock little by little and washes the salt into the rivers.

The river water eventually collects in the sea.

When the sun warms the sea water, only the water rises into the sky and becomes clouds.

The salt stays in the sea, so over long years the sea turned salty.

Why is the sea salty but river water is not?

Scoop up a handful of river water and it tastes of nothing. Do the same at the beach and it is unmistakably salty. The difference is one of the oldest questions in earth science, and the answer is slow-moving water.

Rain that falls on mountains is very slightly acidic. As it runs over soil and rock it dissolves tiny amounts of mineral salt and carries them into streams, then rivers, then the sea. A second source sits on the sea floor itself: hot water venting from underwater volcanoes brings up dissolved minerals from deep in the crust.

Rivers keep delivering salt, but the sea has no drain. When the sun heats the surface, only the water evaporates into the sky to form clouds — the salt stays behind. Repeat that cycle for hundreds of millions of years and you get the ocean we have today: roughly 35 grams of salt in every litre of seawater, about 3.5 percent.

The sea is not getting saltier and saltier, though. Salt is also removed, locked into sea-floor sediment and minerals, at about the rate it arrives — so the concentration has stayed close to steady for a very long time.

This story is written at six Japanese school-grade levels. The Grade 1 version uses only first-grade kanji; the Grade 6 version reaches sixth-grade words such as 蒸発 and 供給. Pick the level that matches what you already know and read it in real Japanese, with furigana and a sentence-by-sentence translation beside it.

How salty is seawater?

Seawater is about 3.5 percent salt — roughly 35 grams of dissolved salts in every litre. Most of it is sodium chloride, ordinary table salt, with smaller amounts of magnesium, calcium and potassium salts. The Grade 4 version of this article gives that figure in Japanese.

Not sure which level you are?

Pick the hardest line you can still read. 20 seconds, no account needed.

Why six school grades, and not N5–N1?

Because that is how Japanese children learn to read. Japan's Ministry of Education fixes exactly which character belongs to which grade — so "grade 3" is a boundary you can verify, not a feeling. Every article here is machine-checked: if a single character sits above its grade, it is not published.

The result: you never hit a character you have not learned. That is the whole reason this product exists.

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