Japanese writing system

The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of <a href="/facts/Logogram/wWYAITGc">logographic</a> <a href="/facts/Kanji/E1IN7hVL">kanji</a>, which are adopted <a href="/facts/Chinese_character/5pn1PFvj">Chinese characters</a>, and <a href="/facts/Syllabary/GCbFXaJ4">syllabic</a> <a href="/facts/Kana/kQCM4maE">kana</a>. Kana itself consists of a pair of <a href="/facts/Syllabary/GCbFXaJ4">syllabaries</a>: <a href="/facts/Hiragana/RTn1gxfS">hiragana</a>, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and <a href="/facts/Katakana/mmdWMTNr">katakana</a>, used primarily for foreign words and names, <a href="/facts/Gairaigo/KCk6c5pI">loanwords</a>, <a href="/facts/Onomatopoeia/5Nt1B80G">onomatopoeia</a>, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis. Almost all written Japanese sentences contain a mixture of kanji and kana. Because of this mixture of scripts, in addition to a large inventory of kanji characters, the Japanese writing system is considered to be one of the most complicated currently in use.
Several thousand kanji characters are in regular use, which mostly originate from traditional Chinese characters. Others made in <a href="/facts/Japan/U5mz0SRT">Japan</a> are referred to as "Japanese kanji" (和製漢字, wasei kanji), also known as "[our] country's kanji" (国字, kokuji). Each character has an intrinsic meaning (or range of meanings), and most have more than one pronunciation, the choice of which depends on context. Japanese primary and secondary school students are required to learn 2,136 <a href="/facts/J%25C5%258Dy%25C5%258D_kanji/Sappxsa8">jōyō kanji</a> as of 2010. The total number of kanji is well over 50,000, though this includes tens of thousands of characters only present in historical writings and never used in modern Japanese.
In modern Japanese, the hiragana and katakana syllabaries each contain 46 basic characters, or 71 including <a href="/facts/Diacritics/Rw6lMzQW">diacritics</a>. With one or two minor exceptions, each different sound in the Japanese language (that is, each different syllable, strictly each <a href="/facts/Mora_(linguistics)/7uNR6X4c">mora</a>) corresponds to one character in each syllabary. Unlike kanji, these characters intrinsically represent sounds only; they convey meaning only as part of words. Hiragana and katakana characters also originally derive from Chinese characters, but they have been simplified and modified to such an extent that their origins are no longer visually obvious.
Texts without kanji are rare; most are either children's books—since children tend to know few kanji at an early age—or early electronics such as computers, phones, and video games, which could not display complex <a href="/facts/Grapheme/uzXGIsAr">graphemes</a> like kanji due to both graphical and computational limitations.
To a lesser extent, modern written Japanese also uses initialisms from the <a href="/facts/Latin_alphabet/pqWVHpBz">Latin alphabet</a>, for example in terms such as "BC/AD", "a.m./p.m.", "FBI", and "CD". <a href="/facts/Romanized_Japanese/7JdM0cAy">Romanized Japanese</a> is most frequently used by foreign students of Japanese who have not yet mastered kana, and by native speakers for <a href="/facts/Japanese_language_and_computers/n0HcHDHs">computer input</a>.

Japanese writing system open-in-new

Japanese writing system