This Japanese All About lesson will teach you about the three types of artistic scripts that make up the written Japanese language, kanji, hiragana, and katakana, and the roles they play in putting together sentences.
The Japanese writing system uses two syllabic scripts, known separately as hiragana (ひらがな) and katakana (カタカナ) and collectively as kana (かな), as well as thousands of Chinese characters known as kanji (漢字). Each script serves a different function.
- Hiragana: grammatical elements and for words that do not use kanji (or for words where the author doesn’t know the kanji).
- We use the hiragana syllabary for two types of words; okurigana (送り仮名), which are inflected verb and adjective endings; and for grammatical elements called “particles.” Hiragana is also used to write furigana (ふりがな), small symbols placed above or to the side of a kanji character that indicate how it is read.
- Katakana to write borrowed words of foreign origin and onomatopoeic sound effects.
- We use the katakana syllabary for gairaigo (外来語), words of foreign origin, onomatopoeic words that indicate sounds, scientific names, and also for emphasis, much like how italics are used in English.
There are forty-six characters in the hiragana and katakana scripts, for a total of ninety-two characters in all. These characters represent specific syllables which are made up of a consonant plus a vowel or just one vowel sound.
In Japanese, there are five vowels (a, i, u, e, and o) and fourteen basic consonants (k, s, t, n, h, m, y, r, w, g, z, d, b, and p).
Kanji is used for words of both Japanese and Chinese origin as well as many Japanese names.]
Kanji are made up of smaller parts known as radicals. Many characters have been combined with others to create new ones. When written on the page, each character is given exactly the same amount of space, no matter how complex it is. In written Japanese, there are no spaces between characters.
Most kanji have at least two different kinds of readings: kun yomi (訓読み), which is the Japanese reading, and on yomi (音読み), which is the original Chinese reading.
