Japanese Writing System

Remember the first time we read an old Japanese document or Japanese manga, we found it so weird that the way Japanese people write is so different from what we used to. Not to mention there was a bunch of "weird characters" that we had never seen before. But that is the old story, today, we will take a deeper look inside Japanese Writing System and understand how it works.

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1 - Japanese Writing Style

In English, we always used to the writing style from left to right, reading also from left to right. However in Japanese, reading book is from right to left. For example with Japanese manga, we have to turn page from right to left, we also have to read from right panel to left panel. In term of text, they usually write text in columns, reading order will be from top to bottom, from right to left. Still, in some cases, the text is written in left-to-right order.

2 - Hiragana in Japanese Writing

It is said that Hiragana was actually changed version of Chinese character. At the beginning, only women used Hiragana, on the other hand men used Kanji and Katakana. Due to this reason, at that time Hiragana was also called as "Onnade" which means "woman's hand". However, the situation changed since the 10th century as Hiragana was gradually used more than the past.

We learned that Hiragana is the first syllable chart that we have to master, but
sad thing is in Japanese nowadays it was used as particles such as は (wa), に (ni), .etc... in Japanese writing. Even so, there are still exceptions, for example, Japanese books for children always written in Hiragana with some basic Kanji words included for learning purpose. In some other cases like complicated or rare Kanji words, they are written in Hiragana.

3 - Katakana in Japanese Writing

Just like Hiragana, Katakana was also created from Chinese character. And as mentioned above, while Hiragana was mainly used by women, Katakana was mainly used by men. But of course, this situation has changed as what we see today.

So there is a question: "How they deal with foreign words which they did not see before?". The answer is they adopt those new words into Japanese, and then write them in Katakana. Such is the purpose of Katakana in Japanese writing, it is mostly used in order to write borrowed words from other languages. In some cases it is also used to write word which is need to be emphasized.

4 - Kanji in Japanese Writing

Needless to say Kanji takes a very important role in Japanese writing system as it is used to write almost all Japanese words from nouns, verbs to adjectives, .etc... Of course there are many reasons for this, one of the main reason is that most of the time, there is no space between words. In order to distinguish words in the sentence they need to use Kanji, and also Kanji can help them distinguish different words which has the same Hiragana writting (for example the word "chopstick" and "bridge" can be both written as "hashi"). Still, in some cases they will write Hiragana above the Kanji word (this is called as Furigana) like in case of manga.

And that is the explaination about Japanese writing system! Stay tune, have fun and good luck in your Japanese learning journey!

Source: blog.akirademy.com