![japanese alphabet letters spell words japanese alphabet letters spell words](https://oppidanlibrary.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Kanji-Alphabet-Poster.jpg)
Writing some of your ad in English or French imparts a bit of je ne sais quois, in the same way that adding a little French to English does. Romaji are also used to write out personal and corporate names, especially when being printed for foreign use.īeyond these explicitly practical uses, romaji are used to add a bit of flair to text. They’re used for acronyms (like NASA, FBI, or JAXA), foreign names, foreign quotations, and as part of mixed-use words (for example, Tシャツ, “T-shatsu”). Romaji are used for a variety of purposes.
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The extent of Romaji is the same as in English, with just 26 letters being required. I put “real” and “alphabet” in quotes because, as mentioned, the kana are actually classified as syllabaries (we’ll get to what exactly that means in a moment) and kanji are logographs. The only “real alphabet” used by Japanese is romaji. There are 46 characters in hiragana and katakana each, with hiragana and katakana being mirrors of each other, similar to capital and lower case letters in English. Kana are similar to letters in that they each represent a sound. There’s romaji (the same type of characters you’re reading now), kanji (Chinese characters), and then the syllabaries-hiragana and katakana-which are together known simply as kana. The so-called Japanese alphabet is made up of four writing systems however, strictly speaking, none of them are true alphabets.
![japanese alphabet letters spell words japanese alphabet letters spell words](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/99/2e/91/992e91017ce801263c833f0bce103e17.jpg)
What are these so-called “alphabets”? What do they look like? How do they work? Well, that’s what this article is all about.īy the end, you’ll know what the writing system looks like, how it’s used, what it’s called, and I’ll even send you off with some history about the long, strange development of Japan’s writing system.īut let’s start simple. That’s four writing systems in total, employed daily and in all walks of life by the Japanese. If you’re talking about the Japanese “alphabet” you’re stepping into some fraught waters.įirst, as any internet pedant with a self-appointed PhD in Japan Cultural Studies will tell you, Japan doesn’t have an alphabet.