The Japanese writing system

The Japanese writing system
The Japanese written language consists of a combination of three types of characters. To
a lesser extend it nowadays also uses some Latin alphabet for abbreviations and
numbers.

Kanji (
漢字
)
Kanji
originally came from China to Japan. The term “
kanji
” literally means “Han
characters” or “Chinese characters” and it is identical to the characters in China to
describe their writing.
Kanji
are mainly used to describe names and nouns. When used in verbs and adjectives
they mostly are written in combination with
hiragana
. Most sentences include
kanji
as well
as
hiragana
.
Japanese dictionaries list around 10,000
kanji
. The Japanese government limited the
kanji
used in official publications to the 1945
touyou kanji
with about 4000 readings. The
Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) is based on these 1945
touyou kanji
.
A Japanese with average education knows around 3000
kanji
and it is estimated that
around 4000
kanji
are used in Japanese literature.

Hiragana (
平仮名
)
Hiragana
is a phonetic alphabet that was developed in the ninth century to simplify writing.
It nowadays is mainly used for native Japanese words.
Hiragana
are derived from more
complex
kanji
and each
hiragana
represents a syllable. A total of 46
hiragana
are used in
contemporary Japanese writing.
List of the 46
hiragana and their 25 diagritics (with