The modern uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters; and phonographic kana, which evolved from cursives/components of Chinese characters. Modern kana consists of two sets of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign names, loanwords (gairaigo), onomatopoeia, scientific terminology and sometimes for emphasis. A third set, hentaigana, are historical variants of the now-standard hiragana, and are still sometimes used for stylistic purposes. 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 usable kanji characters, the Japanese writing system is considered to be one of the most complicated currently in use.
Several thousand kanji characters are in regular use, which mostly originate from traditional Chinese characters. Others made indigenously in Japan are referred to as "Japanese kanji" (), also known as "[our] country's kanji" (). Each character has an intrinsic semantic meaning (or range of meanings), and most have more than one pronunciation, the choice of which depends on context. There are 2,136 commonly used ones (jōyō kanji) as of 2010, and Japanese school students are required to learn 1,026 characters (kyōiku kanji) before graduating sixth grade. The total number of kanji is well over 50,000, though this includes tens of thousands of characters only present in historical writings and never used in modern Japanese. Despite the complexity of writing kanji, modern Japanese 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, including computers, feature phones and video games, which could not display complex graphemes like kanji due to both graphical and computational limitations of the hardware and software.
In modern kana usage, hiragana and katakana syllabaries each contain 46 basic characters (which can be organized using the gojūon), or 71 including diacritics, in their alphabet sets. 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, the only function of kana characters is to transcribe pronunciations; they can only convey semantic meanings after forming words. Although hiragana and katakana characters both derived from the earlier man'yōgana — which are Chinese characters used as loangraphs during the Nara period for phonetic transcription using their Middle Chinese pronunciations — their forms have been simplified/modified to such an extent that they are no longer visually obvious to their grapholinguistic origins.
To a lesser extent, modern written Japanese also uses initialisms 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.
Use of scripts Kanji are logographic characters taken from Chinese script (since 1946, simplified to shinjitai) and used in the writing of Japanese.
It is known from archaeological evidence that the first contacts that the Japanese had with Chinese writing took place in the 1st century AD, during the late Yayoi period. However, the Japanese people of that era probably had little to no comprehension of the script, and they would remain relatively illiterate until the 5th century AD in the Kofun period, when writing in Japan became more widespread.
Kanji characters are used to write most content words of native Japanese or (historically) Chinese origin, which include the following:
many nouns, such as (kawa, "river") and (gakkō, "school") the stems of most verbs and adjectives, such as in (miru, "see") and in (shiroi, "white") the stems of many adverbs, such as in (hayaku, "quickly") and as in (jōzu ni, "masterfully") most Japanese personal names and place names, such as (Tanaka) and (Tōkyō). (Certain names may be written in hiragana or katakana, or some combination of these, plus kanji.)
Some Japanese words are written with different kanji depending on the specific usage of the word—for instance, the word naosu (to fix, or to cure) is written when it refers to curing a person, and when it refers to fixing an object.
Most kanji have more than one possible pronunciation (or "reading"), and some common kanji have many. These are broadly divided into on'yomi, which are readings that approximate to a Chinese pronunciation of the character at the time it was adopted into Japanese, and kun'yomi, which are pronunciations of native Japanese words that correspond to the meaning of the kanji character. However, some kanji terms have pronunciations that correspond to neither the on'yomi nor the kun'yomi readings of the individual kanji within the term, such as (ashita, "tomorrow") and (otona, "adult").
Unusual or nonstandard kanji readings may be glossed using furigana. Kanji compounds are sometimes given arbitrary readings for stylistic purposes. For example, in the 5th night of Ten Nights of Dreams by Natsume Sōseki, is used for tsunagatte, the gerundive -te form of the verb tsunagaru ("to connect"), which would usually be written as or . The word , meaning "connection", is normally pronounced setsuzoku.
Kana are a set of syllabic scripts used in the Japanese writing system. The term originally means 'provisional' or 'borrowed names'. In modern usage, kana are primarily divided into hiragana and katakana, though historically they also included other forms such as man'yōgana and sōgana. All types of kana ultimately derive from Chinese characters (kanji): they borrow the original phonetic values of kanji and were developed from simplified forms or components of those characters.
Historically, there was no strict functional distinction between hiragana and katakana. Texts could be written in a mixture of Chinese characters and either form of kana entirely alone without a fixed division of roles. This situation changed following language reforms after World War II, which established a functional division between the two syllabaries comparable to the distinction between lowercase and uppercase letters in Western alphabetic scripts. In contemporary Japanese, the pronunciation and orthography of kana are regulated by the system known as modern kana usage (gendai kanazukai).
Hiragana emerged as a manual simplification via cursive script of the most phonetically widespread kanji among those who could read and write during the Heian period (794–1185). The main creators of the current hiragana were ladies of the Japanese imperial court, who used the script in the writing of personal communications and literature, such as the Tale of Genji.
Hiragana is used to write the following:
—inflectional endings for adjectives and verbs—such as in (miru, "see") and in (shiroi, "white"), and respectively and in their past tense inflections (mita, "saw") and (shirokatta, "was white"). —small, usually common words that, for example, mark sentence topics, subjects and objects or have a purpose similar to English prepositions such as "in", "to", "from", "by" and "for". miscellaneous other words of various grammatical types that lack a kanji rendition, or whose kanji is obscure, difficult to typeset, or considered too difficult to understand for the context (such as in children's books). —phonetic renderings of hiragana placed above or beside the kanji character. Furigana may aid children or non-native speakers or clarify nonstandard, rare, or ambiguous readings, especially for words that use kanji not part of the jōyō kanji list.
There is also some flexibility for words with common kanji renditions to be instead written in hiragana, depending on the individual author's preference (all Japanese words can be spelled out entirely in hiragana or katakana, even when they are normally written using kanji). Some words are colloquially written in hiragana and writing them in kanji might give them a more formal tone, while hiragana may impart a softer or more emotional feeling. For example, the Japanese word kawaii, the Japanese equivalent of "cute", can be written entirely in hiragana as in , or with kanji as .
Some lexical items that are normally written using kanji have become grammaticalized in certain contexts, where they are instead written in hiragana. For example, the root of the verb (miru, "see") is normally written with the kanji for the mi portion. However, when used as a supplementary verb as in 試してみる (tameshite miru) meaning "to try out", the whole verb is typically written in hiragana as , as we see also in (tabete miru, "try to eat [it] and see").
Katakana emerged around the 9th century, in the Heian period, when Buddhist monks created a syllabary derived from Chinese characters to simplify their reading, using portions of the characters as a kind of shorthand. The origin of the system is attributed to the monk Kūkai.
Katakana is used to write the following:
transliteration of foreign words and names (by transcription into Japanese), such as (konpyūta, "computer") and (Rondon, "London"). However, some foreign borrowings that were naturalized may be rendered in hiragana, such as たばこ (tabako, "tobacco"), which comes from Portuguese. commonly used names of animals and plants, such as (tokage, "lizard"), (neko, "cat") and (bara, "rose"), and certain other technical and scientific terms, including chemical and mineral names such as (kariumu, "potassium"), (porimā, "polymer") and (beriru, "beryl"). occasionally, the names of miscellaneous other objects whose kanji are rare, such as (rōsoku, "candle"); the kanji form, , contains the hyōgaiji . onomatopoeia, such as (wan-wan, "woof-woof"), and other sound symbolism emphasis, much like italicisation in European languages.
Katakana can also be used to impart the idea that words are spoken in a foreign or otherwise unusual accent; for example, the speech of a robot.
Rōmaji The first contact of the Japanese with the Latin alphabet occurred in the 16th century, during the Muromachi period, when they had contact with Portuguese navigators, the first European people to visit the Japanese islands. The earliest Japanese romanization system was based on Portuguese orthography. It was developed around 1548 by a Japanese Catholic named Anjirō.
The Latin alphabet is used to write the following:
Latin-alphabet acronyms and initialisms, such as NATO or UFO Japanese personal names, corporate brands, and other words intended for international use (for example, on business cards, in passports, etc.) foreign names, words, and phrases, often in scholarly contexts foreign words deliberately rendered to impart a foreign flavour, for instance, in commercial contexts other Japanized words derived or originated from foreign languages, such as (jei rīgu, "J.League"), (tī shatsu, "T-shirt") or (bī-kyū gurume, "B-rank gourmet [cheap and local cuisines]")
Arabic numerals
Arabic numerals (as opposed to traditional kanji numerals) are often used to write numbers in horizontal text, especially when numbering things rather than indicating a quantity, such as telephone numbers, serial numbers and addresses. Arabic numerals were introduced in Japan probably at the same time as the Latin alphabet, in the 16th century during the Muromachi period, the first contact being via Portuguese navigators. These numerals did not originate in Europe, as the Portuguese inherited them during the Arab occupation of the Iberian peninsula.