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The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived from components or fragments of more complex kanji. Katakana and hiragana are both kana systems. With one or two minor exceptions, each syllable (strictly mora) in the Japanese language is represented by one character or kana in each system.
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.
As Kanji are logographic and Kana encode entire syllables (or rather, morae), the higher information density of Japanese writing usually evens out with the larger text so that Japanese and English texts take about the same amount of space, but challenges arise with foreign consonant clusters incompatible with Japanese phonotactics and the Kana ...
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 ...
Hiragana and katakana were first simplified from kanji, and hiragana, emerging somewhere around the 9th century, [50] was mainly used by women. Hiragana was seen as an informal language, whereas katakana and kanji were considered more formal and were typically used by men and in official settings.
The "Grade" column specifies the grade in which the kanji is taught in Elementary schools in Japan. Grade "S" means that it is taught in secondary school. 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.
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]
Japanese writers also repurposed kanji to represent native vocabulary; as a result, there is a distinction between Sino-Japanese readings of kanji, called On'yomi, and native readings, called Kun'yomi.