Writing in Japanese

I am very fine and I hope you are too. This week I thought I would write about Japanese writing. This is one of the things that make the language difficult - you can't easily learn to read it like you can Spanish or German. The basic history of the written language is this:

The Japanese adopted their written language from the Chinese and the basic characters are called Kanji. These are the somewhat complicated looking characters that you see and are pictographs. According to one book I have this didn't happen until the 5th or 6th century so it is really pretty recent. Right now there are about 2000 Kanji symbols that most school children learn but there are many more there are either archaic or in uncommon usage.

The characters are similar enough to Chinese that most Japanese can recognize many Chinese symbols even though the languages are very different except for some borrowed words. Interestingly, the Chinese have changed their symbols quite a bit since Mao and the characters used in Taiwan are apparently more similar to those in Japan than what is used in modern China.

Because the Chinese and Japanese languages are so different, the Japanese also adopted two phonetic syllabic writing systems. In other words, each character represents a syllable like ba, ki, or ga. The syllables consist of the vowels a, e, i, o, and u pronounced very similar to Spanish plus a bunch of syllables and "n". All Japanese words end in a vowel or n. The vowels are pretty much always pronounced the same with a few rules and thus pronunciation is "easy".

The first syllabic system is called Hiragana and is used to basically make Kanji usable in Japanese. It is used for grammatical words not present in Chinese, verb endings indicating tense, etc. It can also be used to spell any word in Japanese and is used for that when there isn't a standard Kanji symbol.

The second syllabic system is call Katakana and is used for foreign words and those borrowed from foreign languages. There are a lot of borrowed words, especially scientific words and things adopted from the West. It's 46 characters have exactly the same syllabic sounds as Hiragana. Hirigana and Katakana together are called kana.

Also used is Romaji which is a way of using our alphabet to spell Japanese words. You usually see Romaji in block letters but the Japanese I know can print or write cursive. There is quite a bit of advertising done in English. So Japanese schoolchildren have to learn a lot of characters!

It's interesting to write your name in Japanese. The proper way to write your name as a foreigner is to do it in Katakana. Because not all the sounds present in English exist in Japanese (and remember each word must end in a vowel or n) it isn't going to sound the same as in English. But Japanese characters and Kanji can be very beautiful in their own right and people like to see them written in different ways. For fun, see how my name and that of my brothers can be written in Japanese below.