Japanese Writing System

Japanese Writing System

Kanji

Kana

• Hiragana
• Katakana
• Hentaigana
• Man'yōgana
• Sogana

Uses

• Furigana
• Okurigana

Braille

Rōmaji

• Hepburn (colloquial)
• Kunrei (ISO)
• Nihon (ISO translit.)
• JSL (transliteration)
• Wāpuro (keyboard)

Punctuation

The modern Japanese writing system uses three main scripts:

• Kanji, adopted Chinese characters
• Kana, a pair of syllabaries, consisting of:
  • Hiragana, used, along with kanji, for native or naturalised Japanese words, and for grammatical elements
  • Katakana, used for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes to replace kanji or hiragana for emphasis.

Several thousand kanji are in regular use, while in modern Japanese the two syllabaries each contain 46 basic characters (71 including diacritics), each representing one sound in the Japanese language. Almost all Japanese sentences contain both kanji and hiragana, while some additionally use katakana. (For those unfamiliar with either language, the frequent appearance of the relatively distinctive hiragana characters is an easy way to distinguish written Japanese from Chinese.) Because of this mixture of scripts in addition to a large inventory of kanji characters, the Japanese writing system is often considered to be the most complicated in use anywhere in the world.

To a lesser extent, modern written Japanese also uses acronyms from the Latin alphabet, for example in terms such as "BC/AD", "a.m./p.m.", "FBI", and "CD". Romanized Japanese, called rōmaji, is frequently used by foreign students of Japanese who have not yet mastered the three main scripts, and by native speakers for computer input.

The Japanese writing system allows for transmitting information that is usually communicated in other languages by using different words or by adding extra descriptive words. For example, writing a word in English may give it a modern or 'hip' flair.