Interesting Facts! #3

3.There are four different writing systems in Japan; Romaji, Katakana, Hiragana, and Kanji.

- When you first start learning Japanese, you most likely start out with romaji.The word rōmaji literally means "roman letters". Romaji is using an alphabet you already know to write and read Japanese. It's the representation of Japanese sounds using the western, 26-letter alphabet.

-Katakana (片仮名, カタカナ) the more angular form of kana (syllabic writing) used in Japanese, primarily used for words of foreign origin. Japanese has two forms of phonetic writing, hiragana and katakana. In modern Japanese, most writing is done in a mixture of hiragana and kanji (Chinese characters). Katakana tends to be used for gairaigo and onomatopoeia, while hiragana tends to be used for native Japanese words. 

-Hiragana (平仮名, ひらがな) the more cursive and more widely used form of kana (syllabic writing) used in Japanese, especially used for function words and inflections. Hiragana is the basic Japanese phonetic alphabet. It represents every sound in the Japanese language. Much like English where each character has a unique sound and the characters can be written one after the next to spell out a word. Learning hiragana is the first step in learning how to read and write Japanese - indeed it is the first of the three Japanese scripts that Japanese children learn.

-Kanji (漢字) a system of Japanese writing using Chinese characters. Kanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters (hanzi) that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana and katakana. The script was invented by the Chinese and adopted by the Japanese around the middle of the 6th century AD ( first introduced to Japan in the 5th or 6th century via Korea.) There's between 5,000 and 10,000 characters, but most of them are only used in people's names.

                                                                               -The more you know~