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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.
The list is sorted by Japanese reading (on'yomi in katakana, then kun'yomi in hiragana), in accordance with the ordering in the official Jōyō table. This list does not include characters that were present in older versions of the list but have since been removed (勺, 銑, 脹, 錘, 匁). Hyphens in the kun'yomi readings separate kanji from ...
Hiragana (平仮名, ひらがな, IPA: [çiɾaɡaꜜna, çiɾaɡana (ꜜ)]) is a Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana as well as kanji. It is a phonetic lettering system. The word hiragana means "common" or "plain" kana (originally also "easy", as contrasted with kanji). [ 1 ][ 2 ][ 3 ] Hiragana and ...
Japanese phonology is the system of sounds used in the pronunciation of the Japanese language. Unless otherwise noted, this article describes the standard variety of Japanese based on the Tokyo dialect. There is no overall consensus on the number of contrastive sounds (phonemes), but common approaches recognize at least 12 distinct consonants ...
v. t. e. The romanization of Japanese is the use of Latin script to write the Japanese language. [ 1 ] This method of writing is sometimes referred to in Japanese as rōmaji (ローマ字, lit.'Roman letters', [ɾoːma (d)ʑi] ⓘ or [ɾoːmaꜜ (d)ʑi]). Japanese is normally written in a combination of logographic characters borrowed from ...
Katakana are commonly used on signs, advertisements, and hoardings (i.e., billboards), for example, ココ (koko, "here"), ゴミ (gomi, "trash"), or メガネ (megane, "glasses"). Words the writer wishes to emphasize in a sentence are also sometimes written in katakana, mirroring the usage of italics in European languages.
The term kanji in Japanese literally means " Han characters". [4] It is written in Japanese by using the same characters as in traditional Chinese, and both refer to the character writing system known in Chinese as hanzi (traditional Chinese: 漢字; simplified Chinese: 汉字; pinyin: hànzì; lit. ' Han characters'). [5]
'Kana' is a compound of kari (仮, 'borrowed; assumed; false') and na (名, 'name'), which eventually collapsed into kanna and ultimately 'kana'. [3]Today it is generally assumed that 'kana' were considered "false" kanji due to their purely phonetic nature, as opposed to mana which were "true" kanji used for their meanings.