Since mainland China promoted simplified versions of Chinese characters to improve literacy in the 1950s, a kanji and simplified Chinese character that derive from the same traditional character can now be unrecognizable from each other. They came to Japan from China about 2,000 years ago and have since transformed such that many are now unique to the Japanese language (altered forms of the original character). Last but not least, kanji-essentially Chinese characters. You can think of them as like uppercase and lowercase letters in English: “APPLE” and “apple” would look like entirely different words to an alien, but for us they have exactly the same meaning and pronunciation. Hiragana and katakana are simply two different ways of writing the same syllable. Starbucks ⇒ sutābakusu ⇒ sutabaĮach syllable in hiragana has a one-to-one relationship with katakana, and vice versa. These foreign words sometimes undergo their own transitions within the Japanese language, pushed, pulled, and abbreviated until they are no longer recognisable. In many cases these words do exist in Japanese but it is by no means uncommon for Japanese speakers to deliberately use the English word (with the Japanese pronunciation) instead. cake, meeting, business, hot dog, computer, etc. Originally developed from parts of Chinese characters, katakana is today used to write words borrowed from other languages, e.g. This is unlike English where the pronunciation of “s” differs between “sun” and “shine”, for example. Technically speaking, we should refer to hiragana as a syllabary since each character represents a defined syllable, the pronunciation of which will not change regardless of order or position in the sentence.
Particles and conjugations of verbs are written in hiragana and you can think of it as the main “alphabet” in the language. ô), so the correct spelling of romaji is actually rômaji.
Elongated vowels are represented with an over line bar (e.g. watashi ha gakusei desu.Īpproximate phonetics should be obvious when you see romaji, noting that the pronunciation of “r” is actually closer to “l” and the particle “ha” is actually pronounced “wa”. Regrettably, it’s usually the first thing you’ll be introduced to when you start learning Japanese as teachers put off introducing hiragana and start by writing simple sentences like the following in romaji. Like pinyin for Chinese, romaji is used to apply Latin script to Japanese characters (ji means letter, roma refers to the romanisation). In addition, romaji is used to give Latin phonetics to the symbols of the Japanese scripts. There are three core scripts in Japanese: kanji, hiragana, and katakana.
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