The main form for writting and speaking Japanese:
- Kigō
Written Japanese comprises of:
- Hiragana (平仮名 or ひらがな or ヒラガナ)
- Kanji (漢字)
- Katakana (カタカナ or 片仮名)
- Kokuji (国字)
Written Japanese
The Japanese writing system uses the phonetic character sets (idiograms), called Hiragana and Katakana, and the Chinese characters, called Kanji (Hanzi in Chinese).
In normal Japanese writing, Hiragana and Kanji are used, while Katakana is used for words borrowed from the non-Chinese foreign languages.
Romaji, (Westernised writing), an unusual form of writing Japanese with the Latin alphabet.
Kannji
These characters originate from Chinese and account for 50% of Japanese vocabulary.
Kanji are ideographs (borrowed from China). An educated person can read 10,000 of them and the government has published a list of 1,850 that it considers basic.
Hiragana (Furigana)
Kokuji
Japanese Characters
Each character has its own meaning (like a word), though many are used only in combination with other characters. So each character is equivalent to one word, although as you can see below, various characters can describe one word:
Chinese verbs and adjectives consist of one character but nouns consist of two or more characters.
There are no spaces between characters and the characters which make up multi-syllable words are not grouped together, so when reading Chinese, you not only have to work out what the characters mean and how to pronounce them, but also which characters belong together.
Simplified Chinese
Canadian French and Standard French differ little in the written form. It is dominant in Quebec where it is the dominant language (see map). Canadian French uses some verbs used in Standard French in 1700's as well as some anglicisms,
a sign of the influence English has had. These differences are due to Quebec's isolation from France in terms of distance and commercial links since the 1700's.
USA has always had strong commercial links.
Traditional Chinese
French, although the most widely spoken of any language in Africa, is normally a second language, with the dominant language being the national native language. Although some classes (middle-upper) in Tunisia, Algeria and Morroco speak it as a first language or are bilingual (French/Arabic).
Direction of writing
Japanese is generally written vertically beginning on the right, but many texts today are written horizontally to permit the inclusion of English words, Arabic numerals, and mathematical and chemical formulas.