Since Japanese is as different from Chinese as it is to any other language, simply using the Chinese writing system was not sufficient, and a more appropriate way of writing Japanese was sought out. Some say that the “tragedy” started when Japan decided to “import” the Chinese writing system, inscribing it into their own language in the 3rd century. This is hard enough for native speaker to get right every time, so I almost feel sorry for those non-natives who are learning to read and write Japanese.įrom top to bottom: Kanji is mainly used for the lexical elements: nouns, verb stems, adjective stems, and so forth Hiragana has rounded letter shapes, which are mainly used for the grammatical elements of sentences such as particles, auxiliary verbs, and suffixes of nouns Katakana has an angular letter shape, which is most often used for foreign words and also for the purpose of emphasis. Although there is a basic rule for when to use which script, there are many exceptions, and what’s worse is that words written in Kanji have often multiple pronunciations, depending on the context or conjunction. There are a few thousand Kanji characters, while Hiragana and Katakana have 46 each. Modern Japanese is written in a mixture of three basic scripts: Kanji - which are Chinese ideographic symbols - as well as Hiragana and Katakana - two phonetic alphabets (syllables).
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