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The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana.Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis.
A variant 乄 is used as well, to indicate that a letter is closed, as abbreviation of 閉め. The character originated as a cursive form of ト, the top component of 占 (as in 占める shimeru), and was then applied to other kanji of the same pronunciation. See ryakuji for similar abbreviations. This character is also commonly used in ...
Hiragana character shapes were derived from Chinese cursive script (sōsho). Shown here is a sample of cursive script by 7th century calligrapher Sun Guoting. Note the character 為 (wei), indicated by the red arrow, closely resembles the hiragana character ゐ (wi).
The list below shows the Japanese readings of letters in Katakana, for spelling out words, or in acronyms. For example, NHK is read enu-eichi-kē ( エヌ・エイチ・ケー ) . These are the standard names, based on the British English letter names (so Z is from zed , not zee ), but in specialized circumstances, names from other languages ...
A numeric character reference refers to a character by its Universal Character Set/Unicode code point, and a character entity reference refers to a character by a predefined name. A numeric character reference uses the format &#nnnn; or &#xhhhh; where nnnn is the code point in decimal form, and hhhh is the code point in hexadecimal form.
Azeri has the letters Əə, Xx and Qq not present in the Turkish alphabet, and Türkmen has Ää, Žž, Ňň, Ýý and Ww. Latin Characters uniquely (or nearly uniquely) used for Turkic languages: Əə, Ŋŋ, Ɵɵ, Ьь, Ƣƣ, Ğğ, İ, and ı.
A character called a sokuon, which is visually identical to a small tsu ッ, indicates that the following consonant is geminated (doubled). This is represented in rōmaji by doubling the consonant that follows the sokuon. In Japanese this is an important distinction in pronunciation; for example, compare サカ saka "hill" with サッカ sakka ...
Japanese input methods are used to input Japanese characters on a computer. There are two main methods of inputting Japanese on computers. One is via a romanized version of Japanese called rōmaji (literally "Roman character"), and the other is via keyboard keys corresponding to the Japanese kana .