Although there are some study systems that claim you can learn the jōyō kanji in just a couple of months, such claims should not be taken too seriously. Fortunately you don’t need to learn all of these! There is an official list of 2,136 jōyō (general use) kanji that children are taught in school, and these should be your prime focus. There are said to be over 50,000 kanji in total. When you have mastered these you are ready to study kanji. To study the Japanese writing system you should first learn hiragana and katakana. Over time hiragana came to fill the grammatical functions that kanji couldn’t express, and katakana came to be used primarily for foreign words. Katakana was developed by Buddhist monks as a simplified phonetic script which they used to annotate religious texts written in Chinese. Hiragana developed as a more casual alternative to kanji, and was used mostly by women to write informal materials such as letters, diaries, poems, and stories. In the 9 th century hiragana and katakana developed as simplifications of the original Chinese characters. In order to write certain grammatical function words, inflections, and particles, the Japanese had to use some kanji just for their pronunciation rather than their meaning. However, Chinese and Japanese are very different languages with very different grammatical systems. At first Japanese read and wrote only in Chinese, but then they started trying to use Chinese characters to write Japanese. This changed with the introduction of kanji from China. Prior to the 5 th century, Japanese had no writing system to express the written language. To understand why Japanese uses both kanji and kana, it helps to know a little bit about this system’s history. 速く ( hayaku) = quickly The History of Japanese Writing Or they can be used in combination with hiragana to produce verbs, adjectives, and adverbs: Kanji can be combined with other kanji to make compound words: Here are some simple kanji to show you what they look like. They are mostly used to write nouns, and the stems for verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Kanji convey meaning rather than pronunciation. Furigana is very common in children’s books or in textbooks for non-native readers. When hiragana is used this way it is called furigana. Sometimes hiragana is written beside or above a kanji to show how it is pronounced. Katakana tend to be used for foreign words and names, technical terms, and onomatopoeia. They can also be used to write some words when the kanji is too difficult, or obscure to write. Hiragana are mostly used for particles and other grammatical elements such as the endings for verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. The exception to the consonant + vowel rule is the syllable n which is written ん in hiragana, andン in katakana.Īlthough, hiragana and katakana are used to write the same sounds, they are used in different ways. After that each kana combines a consonant with a vowel as shown below. The first five characters listed above express the five vowels. Both hiragana and katakana have 46 basic characters. We can look at the first five kana written in both hiragana and katakana to show you what they look like: Vowel SoundsĪs you can see hiragana has a more cursive appearance, and katakana is more angular. The two kana syllabaries are called hiragana and katakana. There are two phonetic syllabaries called kana which are used to represent syllable sounds, and there are Chinese characters used to represent meaning which in Japanese are called kanji. The Japanese writing system is a complex system of interconnected parts.
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