Japanese writing system.

All I have been talking about in the past posts were about games.. Well, about Street Fighter IV to be exact.. But I think it is time to start a little about the Japanese language.

I thought I would start with their writing system. In Japanese there are 3 different writing systems. Though you might ask which one they use?, They use them all in their daily life reading/writing. These three systems are "Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji".

Now for some history, Japanese did not have a written language of their own, books imported from China was written in Chinese, so the Japanese decided to use their characters in their writings, those characters are now known as the kanji (漢字) which means "Han Characters". These characters are all drawings of things. Around 5,000 characters were imported. The Japanese later decided that these characters are too hard, specially for the children when they first started learning them so what they did is that they created alphabets.

The Hiragana and Katakana are the alphabets of Japanese. Just like the "A, B, C, ..." in English. The same pronunciation of characters in Hiragana are in Katakana but they look different. Hiragana have smoother lines while Katakana have more sharper edges.

Hiragana is used for words that are originally Japanese. They are also used for particles and connectors. While on the other hand, Katakana is used for words that are not originally Japanese, for example an American name will be written in Katakana instead of Hiragana.

There are no real consonants in Japanese. There are 5 Vowels though which are in order "A, I, U, E, O", while for their consonants, their first letter is "K". Now there is no "K" alone in Japanese, there are 5 letters that got K in them. "Ka, Ki, Ku, Ke and Ko" (Which are the combination with the 5 vowels) The same goes for the rest of the consonants.

For their pronunciations:
A as in "cAt"
I as in "Eel"
U as in "whO"
E as in "nEt"
O as in "hOt"

Here are a list of the Japanese Hiragana and Katakana

Hiragana:


Katakana:


The consonants in order are K, S, T, N, H, M, Y, R, W, N as you can see in the list above. You might wonder if those are the only letters. No they are not the only letters, if you add 2 dashes above a letter it changes to another letter, while in 1 letter case if u add a circle above it it also changes to a new letter

If you add the 2 dashes to the following letters they change as follow:
K -> G
か(ka) -> が(ga)
S -> Z
T -> D
H -> B
while if you add the circle the letter changes as follow:
H -> P
は(ha)-> ぱ(pa)

You also will notice an N alone in the list. That is the only letter that can be stopped at in the end of the word.

There are some different combination's that can be done with these letters but I might cover it in another post.

Now to move to the last writing system, which is the Kanji. There are around 5,000 use in Japan. But the good news is that you only need to learn 2,000 to be able to read almost anything in Japan. Isn't that great! only 2,000.... The government had a rule that Japanese newspapers are not allowed to use any character other than those 2,000 characters, But if they had to. They have to put the "Furigana" reading on top of the new Kanji. "Furigana" is basically Hiragana written on top of the Kanji so you would know how it is pronounced.

Now since these characters were imported from China, they were not originally Japanese, not to mention Japanese and Chinese spoken language is far from close. This created some problems upon importing the characters. First the Japanese tried to use Kanji that their Chinese sounded close to a Japanese word. after couple of hundred of years they found this to be impractical so they decided to give the meaning of the kanji to the Japanese word. Though they still kept its Chinese pronunciation. But they also gave it the pronunciation of its Japanese meaning.

Now almost every Kanji has 2 different pronunciation. A Chinese one that's called (On'yomi) and the Japanese pronunciation (Kun'yomi). Al though the Chinese reading was rendered to sound more of a Japanese word. I will give you an Example.
The word "Tokyo" has the 2 Kanji 東京 which means "Eastern capital". It is written Tokyo in English, but it is actually written "Tou Kyou" in Japanese. Tou means East, but Tou is the Chinese reading (On'yomi), The Japanese word for East is "Higashi" 東 As you can see they both have the same Kanji, but are pronounced differently.

Now you might say, when do I read it On'yomi and when I read it Kun'yomi? Basically, when the Kanji is combined with another Kanji to form a new word, you would read the On'yomi for both Kanji, but if the Kanji alone and is not combined, You would read the Kun'yomi instead. though there are situations when this does not work. As for example, Japanese Names usually combine 2~3 Kanji in a name. But they use the "Kun'yomi" for all of the Kanji.

So now, instead of just needing to memorize 2000 Kanji, you need to memorize their On and Kun readings as well.. Isn't that fun?