Language - Part I

This will be a summary about the Japanese language, how it is written down on paper.

Japanese writing has always been an elegant language, the strokes and intricacy of the characters themselves are beautiful. What most people don't know is that there isn't just one character set in Japan, but three, including one written using the Western alphabet.

The various styles are as follows:

• Hiragana
• Katakana
• Kanji
• Romaji

Hiragana

This is the first character set that any Japanese child would learn. It consists of 46 basic symbols with a few modifiers, and is a phonetic alphabet. If needed, the entire Japanese language can be shown using this method. In some books for teaching children kanji, hiragana is used to show how to pronounce the characters.

Hiragana is characterised by it's curvy characters, distinguishing it from the sharper katakana and the far more complicated kanji symbols.

To open a new window with a table of hiragana characters and their pronounciation, click here.

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