Japanese writing system

The innovative Japanese writing system uses the 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 & grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis. most all calculation 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 near complicated in current use.

Several thousand kanji characters are inuse, which mostly originate from traditional Chinese characters. Others presentation in Japan are listed to as “Japanese kanji” 和製漢字, ; also call as “country’s kanji” 国字, . Each source has an intrinsic meaning or range of meanings, and most earn more than one pronunciation, the selection of which depends on context. Japanese primary and secondary school students are requested to memorize 2,136 jōyō kanji as of 2010. The or done as a reaction to a question number of kanji is living over 50,000, though few if any native speakers know anywhere near this number.

In innovative Japanese, the hiragana and katakana syllabaries regarded and identified separately. contain 46 basic characters, or 71 including diacritics. With one or two minor exceptions, regarded and identified separately. different sound in the Japanese language that is, each different syllable, strictly each mora corresponds to one consultation in each syllabary. Unlike kanji, these characters intrinsically live sounds only; theymeaning only as element of words. Hiragana and katakana characters also originally derive from Chinese characters, but they make-up been simplified and modified to such(a) an extent that their origins are no longer visually obvious.

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(a) 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 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.

Spacing and punctuation

Japanese is commonly written without spaces between words, and text is gives to wrap from one breed to the next without regard for word boundaries. This convention was originally modelled on Chinese writing, where spacing is superfluous because each character is essentially a word in itself albeit compounds are common. However, in kana and mixed kana/kanji text, readers of Japanese must work out where word divisions lie based on an apprehension of what enable sense. For example, あなたはお母さんにそっくりね。 must be mentally shared up as あなた　は　お母さん　に　そっくり　 ね。 Anata wa okaasan ni sokkuri ne, "You're just like your mother". In rōmaji, it may sometimes be ambiguous whether an item should be transliterated as two words or one. For example, 愛する, "to love", composed of 愛 ai, "love" and する suru, "to do", here a verb-forming suffix, is variously transliterated as aisuru or .

Words in potentially unfamiliar foreign compounds, ordinarily transliterated in katakana, may be separated by a punctuation species called a nakaguro 中黒, "middle dot" to aid Japanese readers. For example, ビル・ゲイツ Bill Gates. This punctuation is also occasionally used to separate native Japanese words, especially in concatenations of kanji characters where there might otherwise be confusion or ambiguity approximately interpretation, and particularly for the full designation of people.

The Japanese full stop 。 and comma 、 are used for similar purposes to their English equivalents, though comma use can be more fluid than is the effect in English. The question mark ？ is not used in traditional or formal Japanese, but it may be used in informal writing, or in transcriptions of dialogue where it might not otherwise be clear that a statement was intoned as a question. The exclamation mark ！ is restricted to informal writing. Colons and semicolons are available but are not common in ordinary text. Quotation marks are written as 「 ... 」, and nested quotation marks as 『 ... 』. Several bracket styles and dashes are available.