Japanese writing system : Ask Biography

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The modern Japanese writing system uses three main scripts:

*'Kanji', ideographs from Chinese characters,

*'Kana', a pair of syllabaries, consisting of

**'Hiragana', used for native Japanese words, and

**'Katakana', used for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes to replace kanji or hiragana for emphasis.

To a much lesser extent, modern written Japanese also uses phrases from the Latin alphabet such as "CD" and "DVD."

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.

Here is an example of a newspaper headline (from the Asahi Shimbun on 19 April 2004) that uses all four scripts: (kanji (red), hiragana (blue), katakana (green), and Latin Alphabet and Hindu-Arabic numerals (black)):

:

The same headline, transliterated to the Latin alphabet:

:Radokurifu, Marason gorin daihyō ni ichi-man mētoru shutsujō ni mo fukumi

The same headline, translated to English:

:"Radcliffe to compete in Olympic marathon, also implied to appear in the 10,000 m"

Here are some examples of words written in Japanese:

Collation (word ordering) in Japanese is based on the kana, which express the pronunciation of the words, rather than the kanji. The kana may be ordered using two common orderings, the prevalent gojūon (fifty-sound) ordering, or the old-fashioned iroha ordering. Kanji dictionaries are usually collated using the radical system, though other systems, such as SKIP, also exist.