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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.
The Japanese language has many homophones, and conversion of a kana spelling (representing the pronunciation) into a kanji (representing the standard written form of the word) is often a one-to-many process. The kana to kanji converter offers a list of candidate kanji writings for the input kana, and the user may use the space bar or arrow keys ...
Ateji form of "trash bin" (ゴミ入れ, gomi-ire) as "護美入れ", using the ateji form of "ゴミ" ("gomi", "trash"), which literally translates as "protect beauty". In modern Japanese, ateji (当て字, 宛字 or あてじ, pronounced; "assigned characters") principally refers to kanji used to phonetically represent native or borrowed words with less regard to the underlying meaning of ...
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).
A 1940 Japanese Empire propaganda slogan: パアマネントハヤメマセウ (Pāmanento wa yamemashō, "Stop the permanent wave"), with yamemashō written as yamemaseu. In historical kana usage: Two kana are used that are obsolete today: ゐ/ヰ wi and ゑ/ヱ we. These are today read as i and e.
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.