Input Methods
The
Japanese writing system is a mixture of Kanji and Kana. In modern Japanese, Kanji is
used to write certain parts of the language, such as nouns, adjective stems and
verb stems. Kana is made up of two closely related syllabic
scripts:
Hiragana and Katakana. These are character sets used to write
grammatical elements by their phonetic values. Hiragana is used to write inflected
verb and adjective endings (okurigana), particles, and words where
the Kanji is too difficult to read or remember. Conversely, Katakana is used
for representing onomatopoeia and foreign words. Japanese texts may
also include rōmaji
(Latin letters).
Japanese Romanization
Rōmaji is the standard way of transliterating
Japanese into the Latin alphabet. Using the transliterated input, you are
supposed to be aware of the proper transliteration of the hieroglyph you want
to find.
The
Hepburn system is the most widely used romanization
system. See the following tables to find a transliteration of a hieroglyph.
Read in vertical columns running from top to bottom and from right to left, the
first column is hiragana, the second is katakana and the third is rōmaji (Hepburn System), and so on.
Basic
syllables
Additional
syllables
Japanese Writing
System
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Hiragana are characters that represent
sounds, specifically syllables. A syllable is generally composed of a
consonant plus a vowel — sometimes a single vowel will do. In Japanese, there
are five vowels: a, i, u, e, and o; and fourteen
basic consonants: k, s, t, n, h, m, y, r, w, g, z, d, b, and p. It is
important to understand that Hiragana is a syllabary, not an alphabet — you
cannot decompose a Hiragana character into a part that represents the vowel
and a part that represents the consonant. Hiragana (and Katakana, covered in
the next section) is one of the only true syllabaries
still in common use today. Table 1
illustrates a matrix containing the basic and extended Hiragana syllabary. The
following are some notes to accompany Table 1: ·
Several Hiragana have
smaller versions, and are as follows (in parentheses you will find the
standard version): ぁ(あ), ぃ(い), ぅ(う), ぇ(え),
ぉ(お), っ(つ), ゃ(や), ゅ(ゆ),
ょ(よ), and ゎ(わ) ·
Two Hiragana, ゐ and ゑ, are no longer
commonly used ·
The Hiragana を is read as o, not wo ·
The Hiragana ん is considered an
independent syllable, and is pronounced approximately ng Notice that
some cells do not contain any characters. These sounds are no longer used in
Japanese, and thus no longer need a character to represent them. Also, the
first block of characters is set in a 5x10 matrix. This is sometimes referred
to as the 50 Sounds Table (gojuon hyo),
so named because it has a capacity of 50 cells (see Hiragana keyboard). The
other blocks of characters are the same as those in the first block, but with
diacritic marks. In Japanese there are two diacritic marks: dakuten
(also called nigori)
and handakuten (also called maru). The dakuten
appears as two short strokes (゛) in
the upper-right corner of some Kana characters. The dakuten
sers veto voice the consonant portion of the Kana
character to which it is attached. Examples of voiceless consonants include k, s, and t. Their voiced
counterparts are g,
z, and d, respectively.
Hiragana ka
becomes ga
(が)
with the addition of the dakuten. The b sound is a
special voiced version of a voiced h
in Japanese. The handakuten (゜) appears as a small open
circle O in the upper-right corner of Kana characters that begin with the h consonant. It
transforms this h
sound into a p
sound. |
Table 1: The Hiragana Syllabary
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Katakana, like Hiragana, is a
syllabary, and with minor exceptions, they represent the same set of sounds
as Hiragana. Their usage, however, differs from Hiragana. Where Hiragana are
used to write native Japanese words, Katakana are primarily used to write
words of foreign origin, called gairaigo,
to write onomatopoeic words (words that serve to describe a sound, such as buzz or hiss in English),
and for emphasis — similar to the use of italics to represent foreign words
and to express emphasis in English. For example, the Japanese word for bread is
written ノ and read pan. It was
borrowed from the Portuguese word pao,
which is read sort of like pawn.
Katakana are also used to write foreign names. Table 2 illustrates the basic and extended Katakana
syllabary. The
following are some notes to accompany Table 2: ·
Several
Katakana have smaller versions, and are as follows (in parentheses you will
find the standard version): ァ (ア), ィ (イ), ゥ
(ウ), ェ (エ), ォ (オ), ッ (ツ), ャ
(ヤ), ュ (ユ), ョ (ヨ) and ヮ (ワ) ·
Two
Katakana, ヰ and ヱ, are no longer commonly used ·
The
Katakana ヲ is read as o, not wo ·
The Katakana ん is considered an
independent syllable, and is pronounced approximately ng Katakana were derived by extracting a single portion of a whole Kanji, and, like Hiragana, no longer carry the meaning of the Kanji from which they were derived. If you compare several of these characters to some Kanji, you may recognize common shapes. |
Table 2: The Katakana
Syllabary
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Kanji hieroglyphs consist of radical and non-radical
strokes. There are 214 radicals each one consists of from one to seventeen
strokes.
In Kanji there are characters that have
different meanings, and characters that have identical meanings but are written
differently, there are also characters peculiar to Japanese known as kokuji
A Kanji character may have several (in rare
cases ten or more) possible pronunciations, depending on its context, intended
meaning, use in compounds, and location in the sentence. These pronunciations,
or readings, are typically categorized as either on’yomi or kun’yomi (often abbreviated on and kun).
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