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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.
All Japanese who have attended elementary school since World War II have been taught to read and write romanized Japanese. Therefore, almost all Japanese can read and write Japanese by using rōmaji. However, it is extremely rare in Japan to use it to write Japanese (except as an input tool on a computer or for special purposes such as logo ...
Although Kunrei-shiki romanization is the style favored by the Japanese government, Hepburn remains the most popular method of Japanese romanization. It is learned by most foreign students of the language, and is used within Japan for romanizing personal names, locations, and other information, such as train tables and road signs.
Kunrei-shiki romanization (Japanese: 訓令式ローマ字, Hepburn: Kunrei-shiki rōmaji), also known as the Monbusho system (named after the endonym for the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) or MEXT system, [1] is the Cabinet-ordered romanization system for transcribing the Japanese language into the Latin alphabet.
Japanese 10 yen coin. The date beneath the "10" reads 平成七年 Heisei year 7, or the year 1995. The most commonly used date format in Japan is "year month day (weekday)", with the Japanese characters meaning "year", "month" and "day" inserted after the numerals. Example: 2023年12月31日 (日) for "Sunday 31 December 2023".
The oldest written kanji in Japan discovered so far were written in ink on wood as a wooden strip dated to the 7th century, a record of trading for cloth and salt. [citation needed] The Japanese language had no written form at the time Chinese characters were introduced, and texts were written and read only in Chinese.
An example of this mixed style is the Kojiki, which was written in AD 712. Japanese writers then started to use Chinese characters to write Japanese in a style known as man'yōgana, a syllabic script which used Chinese characters for their sounds in order to transcribe the words of Japanese speech mora by mora. Over time, a writing system evolved.
There were no small kana in the pre-reform system; thus, for example, きよ would be ambiguous between kiyo and kyo while かつた could be either katsuta or katta. The pronunciation of medial h-row kana as w-row kana in the pre-reform system does not extend to compound words; thus, にほん was pronounced nihon, not nion (via **niwon).