Window Into Japan

月曜日, 6月 09, 2008

Use of Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji Characters

Use of Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji Characters -

Modern Japanese is written with a mixture of hiragana and katakana, plus kanji.The katakana characters are mainly often used for transcription of words from foreign languages. For example, "television" is written terebi (テレビ). Similarly, katakana is usually used for country names, foreign places, and personal names. For example America is written Amerika (アメリカ), Sunil is written as Suniru (スニル)
A typical Japanese newspaper consists of approximately 70 percent kanji, 20 percent hiragana, and 10 percent katakana.

Consider the following sentence:
English: I will use this computer.
Japanese: 私は、このコンピュータを使います。
Pronunciation: watashi wa kono konpyu-ta wo tsukaimasu

In this sentence the word 'Computer' is written as 'Konpyu-ta' in Katakana.
The rest sentence is a mixture of Hiragana and Kanji Characters.

Hiragana characters are mainly used for all parts of speech except nouns, verbs and adjectives & endings of words written in kanji

Consider the following sentence:
English: The request was sucessfully executed.
Japanese: リクエストは正常に実行されました。
Pronounciation: Rekuesuto wa Seijyou Ni Jikkou saremashita

In this sentence the word 'Request' is written as 'Rekuesuto' in Katakana.
The words 'Sucessfully' and 'Executed' are written in Kanji characters as '正常' (pronounced as Seijyou) and '実行' (pronounced as Jikkou) respectively.
The remaining words are written as Hiragana characters as mentioned below
- Particles 'は' (pronounced as wa) and 'に' (pronounced as ni)
- Endings of words written in kanji 'されました' (pronounced as saremashita)


 
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