The modern Japanese writing system uses three main scripts:
To a lesser extent, modern written Japanese also uses the Latin alphabet—examples include abbreviations such as "CD" and "DVD"—and occasionally hentaigana.
Romanized Japanese, called rōmaji, is frequently used by foreign students of Japanese, who have not yet mastered the three main scripts, and by native speakers for computer input.
Here is an example of a newspaper headline (from the A...
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The modern Japanese writing system uses three main scripts:
To a lesser extent, modern written Japanese also uses the Latin alphabet—examples include abbreviations such as "CD" and "DVD"—and occasionally hentaigana.
Romanized Japanese, called rōmaji, is frequently used by foreign students of Japanese, who have not yet mastered the three main scripts, and by native speakers for computer input.
Here is an example of a newspaper headline (from the Asahi Shimbun on 19 April 2004) that uses all four scripts: (kanji (red), hiragana (blue), katakana (green), and Latin Alphabet and Arabic numerals (black)):
The same headline, transliterated to the Latin alphabet:
The same headline, translated to English:
Here are some examples of words written in Japanese:
Collation (word ordering) in Japanese is based on the kana, which express the pronunciation of the words, rather than the kanji. The kana may be ordered using two common orderings, the prevalent gojūon (fifty-sound) ordering, or the old...
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