Japanese traditionalists regard the order in which the individual strokes are made as being very important. Both writing styles exist side by side today.Įach character is made up of a number of individual strokes. Japanese text can be written in two ways: In Western style, with the text in horizontal rows from the top to the bottom of the page, or in traditional Japanese style, where the text is in vertical columns, working from right to left. When Loan Words are incorporated into Japanese, they are often abbreviated versions of the original word or expression. The Japanese call these “Loan Words” and they are often heavily Japanised. It is also used for “Loan Words”Īs Japanese language developed, many words from foreign languages, especially from Chinese and English, were incorporated into it. Katakana is mainly used for writing the names of persons and geographical places that cannot be written in Kanji. Women used to write almost exclusively in Hiragana as it was simpler to learn and they were denied access to any form of higher education that would have taught them to write in the more complex Kanji system. Many books for young children are, therefore, written entirely in Hiragana. Hiragana is the first of all the writing systems taught to Japanese children. Hiragana and Katakana together are called Kana.Įven though it is theoretically possible to write the whole language in Hiragana, it is usually used only for grammatical endings of verbs, nouns, and adjectives, plus other original Japanese words. Each of these character sets consists of 46 syllables. For words without corresponding Kanji, two additional syllable based scripts are used, Hiragana and Katakana. Unlike the Chinese language, it is not possible to write Japanese entirely in Kanji. or they describe actions such as To Eat or To Go etc. In other words, they describe things that can be seen, such as Mountain, River, Sun etc. Kanji are used for writing nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs. These are examples of some of the many Kanji characters. This is why Japan is also known as “The Land Of The Rising Sun” The expression that was created means "base of the Sun" or "sunrise". ![]() Because the Sun appeared to rise from it, the ancient Chinese named that land by combining the symbol for “Sun” and the symbol for “origin”. The symbol strongly suggests the shape of a tree.īy combining different characters, more words can be created.įor example, from the point of view of the ancient Chinese, the Sun would appear to rise each morning from a land that was out across the sea to the East. The symbols are intended to look like the object they represent. This means that each character has its own meaning and corresponds to a word. Kanji are a set of several thousand Chinese characters that were first introduced into Japan in the 5th Century. ![]() Before the introduction of Chinese characters, no Japanese writing system existed.
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