quick and dirty japanese lesson.

[bluewolf]

I live in korea and koreans have basicly 2 writen languages.

they have the chinese writing that every one in asia uses (although they all pronounce the words differntly)

and they have Hangul which is a phonetic alphabet.

in japan they are much more complicated.

the way i understand it they have the chinese,
then a simplified japan specific form of the chinese,
then a different kind of symbolic writing
and lastly a limited childrens or simple phonetic.

am i correct or am i missing something.

sure i know i could look this up but i want to get a more personal answer from other readers.

[Tatsumaru]

Japanese is composed of three scripts.

1.Kanji, the chinese characters which are commonly used for nouns and adjective and verb stems

2. Hiragana, a phonetic alphabet used for adective and verb endings, particles (word function indicators), and certain conjunctions/language filler, it is very curvy and smooth looking in appearance.Hiragana is geting used more than ever these days thanks to slacking kanji knowledge among the young or just plain laziness.

3. Katakana, a phonetic alphabet that resembles hiragana in sound (except for certain combos that are meant to replace english sounds), however it's use is reserved for foreign words in the japanese vocabulary and also to emphasize certain words sort of like bold/italics.

Most of the time you will see all these scripts utilized at the same time in the same sentence/paragraph. Little children who have not yet had an opportunity to memorize the 5000 kanji needed to be considered competently literate use only hiragana. Also furigana is the use of small hiragana above kanji so that younger readers can understand more difficult kanji. Look at a raw version of the naruto manga for an example.

[Jiraiya]

Also, the kanji (chinese characters) have 2 (or more) different readings, one is the on reading and the other is the kun.

[bluewolf]

gods... thats just crazy. you would think that in this day and age they would simplify it all. I was gonna ask you guys to give me a quick and dirty run down on the phonetic alphabet but it seems that isnt exacly possible. or relatively easy.

the world is too dynamic now adays to depend on chinese script. LOL. i bet china and japan looked down on korea ages ago when they developed their Phonetic alpahbet (a very good system at that) now they have to work with 3 different scripts in the same scentence.

[Tatsumaru]

No actually, korea's system is quite praised if not envied for its efficiency. But the elimination of kanj is not really a good option in japanese because it lacks enough sounds and sound combinations. Because of this lack of sounds in japanese there are many words that sound the same phonetically due to lack of possible sound combinations, so kkanji is used to diffrentiate the different words from eachother. For instance "haku" can mean to wear(anything on the legs), to sweep, to vomit or exhale, or mean white like in the name of the naruto character depending on the kanji used. But kanji is a killer!!!! I can only memorize like 250 chinese charcters right now, basically around a grade 3 or less level :(

[Muk]

the chinese do have a phoenic system, usually used by the taiwanese elemetary children teaching them how to pronounce the traditional words, but it is usually dropped as the students advance. I myself used to be able to read the phoenic a couple of years ago but now i forgot about it :P

but that is totally off topic i guess

[iaido]

The Koreans don't seem to use hanja very much. It's used in my family tree, but that's about it.