Written Japanese

Modern Japanese uses three sets of characters to communicate in writing; kanji (the set of logograms adopted from Chinese), hiragana, and katakana. Both hiragana and katakana are syllabaries called gojūon. Written Japanese intermingles all three of these character sets. A fourth set, rōmaji, consists of western alphabetical characters to assist in communicating with other countries. The primary purpose of this unit is to familiarize you enough with Japanese writing to enable you to make an informed choice about how you want to sign your artwork.

Kanji

Japan had no written language of its own before the 7th Century AD. The Chinese language and use of logograms (many thousands of them) were used for official communications. In the 7th Century, Chinese logograms were adapted to the Japanese language. These logograms are what the Japanese call kanji. Each kanji character retains its original Chinese pronunciation and one or more Japanese pronunciations. They may have multiple meanings, too, depending on the context in which they are used. The Japanese word for Sunday illustrates this. The Japanese word for Sunday is nichi·yō·bi. and is written 日曜日 in kanji. Note that the 日 character is used twice, each of which has a its own pronunciation, nichi and bi. The 曜日 pair (yōbi) means day of the week. Nichi (日) at the beginning makes the whole word (nichiyōbi) mean Sunday. Monday is 月曜日 (getsuyōbi), Tuesday is 火曜日 (kayōbi), and so on.

There have been a number of language reforms over the years aimed at improving overall literacy in Japan which already has one of the most highly literate populations on Earth. The most notable of these reforms is the adoption of a kanji subset for exclusive use in government documents. Newspaper and book publishers are also encouraged to use that subset, and education of it in schools is compulsory. The most current "approved" kanji subset, adopted in 2010, is called jōyō kanji. It contains 2,136 characters. Among exceptions to jōyō kanji use are personal and family names which mostly retain their original forms.

Though Japanese kanji was originally derived from Chinese logograms, many characters have been simplified or have become obsolete over the centuries. In any case, the two languages are so radically different that knowledge of kanji isn't much help in understanding Chinese and vice versa. 

Hiragana

Merely adopting Chinese logograms wasn't enough to support written Japanese, however, because of the unique nature of the language. Without delving into Japanese grammar and syntax, it was essential that there be phonetic characters, too. The result was that two syllabaries were created called gojūon. Gojūon literally means 50 sounds for what originally were 50 symbols in the base syllabaries. Some of the original syllables have gone out of usage. The most important, absolutely essential syllabary is the hiragana set shown in the chart below. No matter how much kanji a person knows, it is not possible to write intelligible Japanese without using hiragana, too. Alternatively, someone who only knows hiragana, young children, for example, can write proper Japanese sentences without using any kanji.

If you study the chart closely, you'll notice that there are five pairs of characters that have the same pronunciation. In both cases, one character is used only for certain words. Also, there are a few exceptions to the pronunciations shown in the hiragana chart, but in order to explain them, it is necessary to get into Japanese grammar; something that is well beyond the scope of this course.

Note that there are 107 hiragana characters for the 107 syllables in the Japanese language. For comparison, English has more than 3000 syllables. The first table with 46 characters contains the base hiragana set. Some of the additional syllables are represented by a combination of two of those base characters, the second of which is written a little smaller and often a little below the first character. Other characters are distinguished by two slightly elongated dots (ten ten) or a little circle (maru), both written in the upper right-hand corner of the character. Here is an example using the syllable は (ha). When adding the two dots, the syllable becomes ば (ba) and it becomes ぱ (pa) by adding the circle. Only some of the characters in the base set are transformed in that way.

Katakana

The other syllabary, katakana, is reserved for special purposes. It is a form of Japanese italics for giving emphasis to certain words. The more angular shapes lent themselves more readily to implementation on early computer dot matrix printers than the curvy hiragana characters. Most importantly, katakana is used for "guest" words; words originating from foreign languages. To support that use, 25 new syllables were added to the katakana character set to assist in foreign word pronunciation. The same convention for the use of two elongated dots (ten ten) and a circle (maru) to distinguish between some hiragana characters is used for katakana.