Japanese writing system

The Japanese writing system is the writing system of the Japanese language. It is made up of three different scripts: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Almost all written Japanese sentences contain a mix of these different scripts. Because written Japanese uses a mixture of scripts and includes a very large number of kanji characters, it is thought to be one of the most complicated writing systems in the world.

Kanji is the oldest type of Japanese script. It is based on Chinese characters and has been used since around the 5th century. There are thousands of different kanji, and students in Japan must learn 2,136 of them by the end of high school, as of 2010. Kanji is logographic, which means that the characters represent meaning rather than sounds. They can be pronounced differently depending on how they are used. This is not the same as hiragana and katakana, which are syllabic, meaning each character represents a different short sound. These types of characters are called kana in Japanese.

Hiragana and katakana first started to be used in the Heian period (794–1185). Hiragana characters are mostly used to write words that are native to the Japanese language, as well as grammatical words like particles. Katakana is used for words from other languages, like foreign names and places. It is also used for onomatopoeia, some scientific names, and sometimes to emphasize words. In modern Japanese, the hiragana and katakana scripts are made up of 46 basic characters, or 71 including diacritics, with each sound in Japanese represented by one character in each script. Like kanji, hiragana and katakana characters are also originally based on Chinese characters, but they have been simplified and changed so much that it is not obvious where they came from.

Modern written Japanese also sometimes uses initialisms from the Latin alphabet, like "BC/AD," "a.m./p.m.," "FBI," and "CD." Romanized Japanese (Japanese written using the Latin alphabet) is mainly used for people who cannot read kanji or kana, like on street signs, passports, and in dictionaries for foreign learners. It also helps write Japanese words in English or other languages. Since the end of World War II, romanized Japanese has been taught in Japanese elementary schools, so most Japanese people can read it, but it is rarely used in everyday writing. Most native Japanese speakers prefer reading kanji and kana.