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.
Read more about Japanese Writing System: Collation, Direction of Writing, Spacing and Punctuation, Romanization
Famous quotes containing the words japanese, writing and/or system:
“In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.... The Japanese people are ... simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art.”
—Oscar Wilde (18541900)
“There is a difference between dramatizing your sensibility and your personality. The literary works which we think of as classics did the former. Much modern writing does the latter, and so has an affinity with, say, night-club acts in all their shoddy immediacy.”
—Paul Horgan (b. 1904)
“As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take this examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one would be a penny the stupider.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)