Japanese Writing
July 8, 2010
In writing Japanese, you will be dealing with 3 types of scripts: hiragana, katakana and kanji.
KANJI (漢字)
Kanji is the most ancient of the three Japanese writing systems. Kanji are Chinese characters adopted by the Japanese. The Japanese term kanji literally means “Han characters” or “Chinese characters”. Among the three main scripts, kanji is the most complicated. A single kanji may have one or more meaning depending on context, intended meaning, use in compounds, and even location in the sentence.
Kanji are used for writing nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs. But unlike the Chinese language, Japanese cannot be written entirely in kanji. For grammatical endings and words without corresponding kanji, two additional, syllable based scripts are being used, hiragana and katakana, each consisting of 46 syllables.
HIRAGANA (ひらがな)
Hiragana is more rounded script and used to write the grammatical parts of words and sentence especially when Kanji is not appropriate for writing.
Unlike Kanji, Hiragana was developed by Japanese people, and today, all the Japanese Children learn Hiragana to write first and then step up to Kanji characters as they grow.
Hiragana is basically phonetic alphabet which means a Hiragana symbol is created by the sound of characters. There are 46 basic Hiragana symbols.
KATAKANA (カタカナ)
Katakana symbols are more sharp and angular than Hiragana symbols. Katakana is often used for representing non-Japanese words or foreign words.
Katakana symbols are also said ‘partial character’ which means the character is a part of Kanji character.
Like Hiragana scripts, Katakana scripts are the same set of sounds and called phonetic alphabetic which has got 46 basic Katakana symbols.
