The Japanese writing system - part 1
02/04/2007
I recently mentioned it and I think it's a good time to talk about the Japanese writing system, rightly notorious for its complexity, but today I'll address the easy concepts.
Before I start, let me precise that my goal is not to write an online Japanese language course, but only to introduce some general principles.
Contrary to popular belief, Japanese is not particularly hard to pronounce for an English speaker (although it is harder than for, say, a French or Spanish speaker). The reverse is not true and that's why Japanese people have huge difficulties with pronouncing most foreign languages.
On the other hand, written Japanese is a whole different ball game...There are two alphabets of 46 characters each, plus a set of several thousands ideograms called kanji. Today, let's talk about the easiest part, the alphabets.
Each of the 46 characters represents a sound (for example ta, shi, ko,...). Some of them can be altered by adding a small symbol, for instance は(ha) that becomes ば(ba) or ぱ(pa). There are also a few diphthongs, for a total of 80 elementary, or atomic, sounds. It might seem a lot but let's compare that with English. Even though the alphabet contains only 26 letters, taking all possible combinations of letters into account (diphthongs, triphthongs, plus combinations that are not actually used but that can be pronounced) goes well above 80. In contrast, keep in mind that the average Japanese can only pronounce their 80 or so syllables...
Here are the alphabets. The hiragana:
And the katakana:
I won't detail the pronunciations since this is not a Japanese lesson, just notice that graphically, the hiragana are rather rounded and the katakana rather angular. The point I want to insist on is that both alphabets contain exactly the same sounds, they are just written in different ways. I see you coming, you are going to ask why a unique alphabet was not enough...
Actually it's very simple, hiragana are used to write actual Japanese words whereas katakana are used to phonetically transcript foreign words: words imported from various languages (English, French, German, Dutch, Portuguese essentially) and proper nouns. Of course, due to the low number of katakana (therefore sounds) available, the original pronunciations are often strongly altered...Indeed, even if the katakana have a little more alterations than the hiragana, the total number still remains pretty low.
If you only know the katakana, you can already understand a couple words in the street, in shops or on restaurant menus and it might come in handy for tourists who do not speak Japanese. Although the hardest part is not to read but to retrieve the original word based on the Japanese adaptation...and that's not always easy to guess, even with practice.
So, if hiragana and katakana together cover all words, what are those thousands of infamous kanji for? The answer is in the next related post!...
Category: Japanese language
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