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| An example of
Japanese kanji. |
Writing
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of
logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters,
and syllabic kana. Kana itself consists of a pair of
syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or
naturalised Japanese words and grammatical elements; and
katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names,
loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes
for emphasis. Almost all written Japanese sentences
contain a mixture of kanji and kana. Because of this
mixture of scripts, in addition to a large inventory of
kanji characters, the Japanese writing system is
considered to be one of the most complicated in current
use. |
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Several thousand kanji characters are in regular use,
which mostly originate from traditional Chinese
characters (表意文字 hyōui moji). Others made in Japan are
referred to as “Japanese kanji” (和製漢字 wasei kanji; also
known as “country’s kanji” 国字 kokuji). Each has an
intrinsic meaning (or range of meanings), and most have
more than one pronunciation, the choice of which depends
on context. Japanese primary and secondary school
students are required to learn 2,136 jōyō kanji as of
2010. The total number of kanji is well over 50,000,
though few if any native speakers know anywhere near
this number. |
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In modern Japanese, the hiragana and katakana
syllabaries each contain 46 basic characters, or 71
including diacritics. With one or two minor exceptions,
each different sound in the Japanese language (that is,
each different syllable, strictly each mora) corresponds
to one character in each syllabary. Unlike kanji, these
characters intrinsically represent sounds only; they
convey meaning only as part of words. Hiragana and
katakana characters also originally derive from Chinese
characters, but they have been simplified and modified
to such an extent that their origins are no longer
visually obvious. |
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Texts without kanji are rare; most are either children's
books—since children tend to know few kanji at an early
age—or early electronics such as computers, phones, and
video games, which could not display complex graphemes
like kanji due to both graphical and computational
limitations.
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 is most frequently used by foreign students of
Japanese who have not yet mastered kana, and by native
speakers for computer input. |
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