Japanese characters

Introduction

The Japanese use four types of script: kanji, katakana, hiragana and romaji. To Western eyes with our 26-letter alphabets and a few accents, they can look daunting, but it's easy to forget that there are in fact two 26-letter alphabets (capital and lower case), plus a whole array of numerals and symbols. The four types of Japanese characters can be divided into two groups - phonetic (where the characters represent sounds) and ideographic (where they represent ideas and concepts). Katakana, hiragana and romaji are phonetic, kanji is ideographic.

Ideographic characters

Kanji

There is not enough space here to go too deeply into kanji, as there are many thousands of characters. In a nutshell, they derive from Chinese characters and are the mainstay of Japanese writing. The pronunciation of a kanji character depends on the context and the characters adjacent to it. For example, The character for "woman" appears in the words for "mother" (onna) and "my wife" (kanai). A brilliant animated basic lesson is provided in this Chinese character tutorial.

Phonetic characters

Whereas the English characters represent sounds, katakana and hiragana represent syllables. Apart from the vowels and the "n" sound, they all combine a consonant and a vowel, so we have ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, etc. The consonant sounds are the roughly the same as they are in English, but the vowels always sound the same, i.e.:

a as in bar
i as in ski
u as in flu
e as in fey
o as in fro.

The "r" sound in Japanese sounds halfway between an "r" and an "l". All Japanese words end with either a vowel or an "n".

Ka-ra-o-ke
To-yo-ta
Mi-tsu-bi-shi
Po-ke-mo-n

Hiragana

The hiragana characters derive in form from Chinese characters but are phonetic in nature. They are used to create particles (similar to English conjunctions) and whole words and to give a tense to a verb, among other things. Hiragana consists of the characters below:

Katakana

Katakana is more modern than hiragana, and is used to express "loan words", words that are directly related to foreign words. English loan words include fiancee, schadenfreude, siesta, kayak, bungalow and tsunami; it's not a uniquely Japanese phenomenon. Because the alphabets are not identical, words usually become the closest approximation to the foreign words:

bijinesuman = businessman
chiizu = cheese
pan = bread (remember your French)

Here are the katakana characters:

Romaji

Most Japanese people are also familiar with the roman alphabet, and it creeps into the culture, particularly through business and Hollywood movies. Romaji is what the Japanese call the roman alphabet. Romaji is also used in transliteration and when learning Japanese.

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