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02-14-2011, 06:31 PM
Quote:
Japanese has three types of 'symbols'. The word for 'Cat' in Japanese is 'neko'. In romaji (abc letters) that's 4 letters but Japanese doesn't use ~letters~, it uses sound characters. So in 'hiragana' Japanese, it's written with two, the one for the sound 'ne' and the one for the sound 'ko' -> ねこ There are 45 basic characters in the hiragana plus a helping of special ones, so if you know them all and you hear a word you can mostly 'spell' it out from the sounds. So if I heard someone say "shungiku", i could spell that out easily because I know the characters for 'shu', 'n', 'gi' and 'ku'. Japanese also uses 'katakana'. It works in the exact same way as hiragana, but looks a little different. It's mostly used for words adopted from other languages (like non-japanese names, 'television', 'ballet' etc) and animal/plant names. 'neko' in katakana is written as ネコ。 The third 'symbol' system is called 'kanji'. These don't represent a sound like hiragana or katakana, they represent a whole word and/or a meaning. So 'neko' in kanji is 猫, just one character. So you can't simply 'spell' a word using kanji. It doesn't work in the same way at all; you either know the kanji, or you don't. It's as simple as that. |
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02-14-2011, 11:40 PM
Just read this: Japanese writing system - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It's better than anyone here is willing to explain it. |
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