What is the difference between kanji and japanese

Hiragana may also be written in small script beside the kanji symbol to serve as a reading or pronunciation guide. The hiragana in this case is referred to as furigana. Hiragana is also used as suffixes in conjunction with kanji to give a particular meaning. This particular use for hiragana is called okurigana. Hiragana also provides grammatical structures to sentences. Short modifiers, called particles, are used together with nouns, verbs and adjectives. These particles are usually written using hiragana.

Katakana is the other syllabary used in Japanese writing. Together with hiragana, they are collectively called kana. Hiragana and katakana work the same way, where each katakana character has a corresponding syllable.

It is made up of 48 characters. Katakana is mainly used for words of foreign, non-Chinese origin as well as foreign names and names of places. It is also used for technical and scientific terms, as well as for onomatopoeic words.

Kanji are logographic characters that represent blocks of meaning and correspond to whole words or phrases. Hiragana and katakana are syllabic characters, with each character representing a sound or syllable. Hiragana is usually used to express the grammatical relationship between words in a sentence.

It may also be used to replace kanji to express words in syllabic characters. Active 1 year, 10 months ago. Viewed k times. Improve this question. Madcowe Madcowe 1 1 gold badge 9 9 silver badges 13 13 bronze badges. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. I think the Wikipedia article on the Japanese writing system explains it pretty well, but to summarize: Hiragana and katakana collectively referred to as kana are syllabic writing, that is, each character represents a syllable such as "ta" or "o".

They're purely phonetic so they don't have direct connotations as kanji do, and both have the same set of syllables. In modern writing: Hiragana is generally used for Japanese words when they're not written in kanji, and for all the grammatical "glue" such as conjugations and particles. Katakana is usually used for loanwords and onomatopoeia. There's no strict rule though, so you will see katakana used for other purposes as well, such as emphasis.

Kanji is ideographic writing, that is, each character represents a concept or an idea. Each character also has one or more readings, and the correct one depends on which word the kanji is part of. Many kanji such as my two examples can also act as stand-alone words.

Improve this answer. Community Bot 1. Matti Virkkunen Matti Virkkunen 3, 24 24 silver badges 20 20 bronze badges. Technically they are syllabaries rather than alphabets. Each represents a syllable which in Japanese is almost always a pair of phonetic sounds or phonemes : a consonant followed by a vowel.

You are right. I will correct it. Sometimes hiragana is written beside or above a kanji to show how it is pronounced. When hiragana is used this way it is called furigana. Kanji convey meaning rather than pronunciation. They are mostly used to write nouns, and the stems for verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Here are some simple kanji to show you what they look like. Prior to the 5 th century, Japanese had no writing system to express the written language.

This changed with the introduction of kanji from China. At first Japanese read and wrote only in Chinese, but then they started trying to use Chinese characters to write Japanese. However, Chinese and Japanese are very different languages with very different grammatical systems.

In order to write certain grammatical function words, inflections, and particles, the Japanese had to use some kanji just for their pronunciation rather than their meaning. In the 9 th century hiragana and katakana developed as simplifications of the original Chinese characters. Hiragana developed as a more casual alternative to kanji, and was used mostly by women to write informal materials such as letters, diaries, poems, and stories.

Katakana was developed by Buddhist monks as a simplified phonetic script which they used to annotate religious texts written in Chinese. To study the Japanese writing system you should first learn hiragana and katakana.

This should not take too long.