Writing Japanese 101

I thought it would be fun to impart a little bit of knowledge with everyone on the Japanese writing system. I'll try and keep it short and amusing, so bear with me a little here.

Japanese has 3 primary writing systems, 4 if you count the use of English characters. Let's not and just say we did though.

So, first up we have hiragana, an alphabet of some 46 characters (not including compounds) used to represent sounds. This system is used initially by children to write all words. However as they progress through school, most of the hiragana is replace by kanji, leaving it to be used to write particles, modify verbs and other specific situations. The well known "konnichiwa" (good day/hello) is written entirely in hiragana - こんにちは.

The second of these systems is katakana. Similar hiragana it is a defined alphabet with 46 base characters. This is used to write all words of foreign origin. Can you guess what the English word behind クリスマス (Kurisumasu), ウイスキー(uisukii) and テレビ (terebi) are? Katakana is also used to write telegrams, cause you know we use those all the time these days, and in advertising to spice things up.

Finally we arrive at kanji, the vast array of complicated symbols that were imported from China (thanks a bunch guys!) at around 57 AD. Kanji represent meaning rather than a single set sound. This means that each kanji may represent anything from a single syllable to a whole word, or both depending on the circumstances. There are tens of thousands of kanji in existence, however you need only know 1945 of them to be able to read a newspaper.

I've been learning Japanese twice a week for about 18 months now and I've picked up about 300 of the little suckers. 300 of the easy ones. And I've probably forgotten half of them at any given time. Not my favourite aspect of Japanese I admit.

One of the kanji I recently learnt is quite amusing - 議 - which is pronounced "gi" or "ぎ" when written in hiragana. About 20 individual strokes make up that character, all for a single syllable. Inconceivable!