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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.
Adding these dots to the sides of characters (right side in vertical writing, above in horizontal writing) emphasizes the character in question. It is the Japanese equivalent of the use of italics for emphasis in English. ※ 2228: 1-2-8: 203B: kome (米, "rice") komejirushi (米印, "rice symbol")
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).
Improvisational characters (假借, “phonetic loan”) (lit. 'improvised-borrowed-word) come into use when a native spoken word has no corresponding character, and hence another character with the same or a similar sound (and often a close meaning) is "borrowed"; occasionally, the new meaning can supplant the old meaning.
Kanji (漢字, pronounced ⓘ) are the logographic Chinese characters adapted from the Chinese script used in the writing of Japanese. [1] They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequently-derived syllabic scripts of hiragana and katakana.
Japanese is written without spaces between words, and in some cases, such as compounds, it may not be completely clear where word boundaries should lie, resulting in varying romanization styles. For example, 結婚する , meaning "to marry", and composed of the noun 結婚 ( kekkon , "marriage") combined with する ( suru , "to do"), is ...
Japanese calligraphy (書道, shodō), also called shūji (習字), is a form of calligraphy, or artistic writing, of the Japanese language. Written Japanese was originally based on Chinese characters only , but the advent of the hiragana and katakana Japanese syllabaries resulted in intrinsically Japanese calligraphy styles.
This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Japanese on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Japanese in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.