The very first thing that you need to know about Japanese writing is that there are three writing methods you need to know and they are – Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji.

Kanji has 1945 ideograms (characters) and Kana has 92 phonetic syllabary(not including the 25 sounds added by dakuten and handukuten) that are represented with an ideogram.

The many ideograms that are learnt, to be able to read Japanese often put people off learning the scripts, but if you compare it to the complexity of the English language and the many words that are spelt differently to how they sound, the Japanese scripts are comparatively easy. The beauty of the written language is often used as an art form which we know as calligraphy!

To create the writing characters you use a series of different strokes rather than with english writing which is continual flow. The Japanese have another script that using our English style letters that makes it much easier for latin based language speakers to understand, and we call this writing Romanji.

Romanji is just Japanese words and their sounds written with Latin letters, such as A,B,C’s

Romanji makes learning Japanese alot easier when starting out because you can read the Romanji and  understand the correct pronunciation before having to worry about learning all the Japanese characters.

For example the word ‘kami’ means paper and the word ’shitagi’ means underwear using Romanji.

Books, Street Signs, advertising, magazines and emails etc…all use these three writing scripts so it is important to learn them to become confident in Japanese.

Kanji is actually borrowed from the Chinese, and is now being borrowed by tatoo artists everywhere too it seems.

Kanji differs from the Hiragana and Katakana with the symbols that make up Kanji representing things, such as fish or chair, and the characters can have a different meaning and pronunciation in different context.

The Hiragana and Katakana writing symbols aren’t like Kanji because they represent syllable of the words.

If you are wanting to learn to speak Japanese to go on holiday to Tokyo then you probably wont need to know how to read straight away and should focus on oral communication first, and you can take online Japanese course rather cheaply or you could learn Japanese in Tokyo by taking a crash course or trying your best to talk with locals as often as possible.

On the other hand if you sitting the Japanese Language Proficiency Test or JLPT for short, then you will need to understand the three writing scripts in more detail.

I hope that helped you understand Japanese writing. Find the Best Online Colleges Universities at BetterOnlineEducation.com

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