Writing System? Really?

Japanese writing system is pretty unique and interesting. It uses multiple systems for writing Japanese.

Kanji	Hiragana	Katakana	Rōmaji	English
私	わたし	ワタシ	watashi	I, me
金魚	きんぎょ	キンギョ	kingyo	goldfish
煙草 or 莨	たばこ	タバコ	tabako	tobacco, cigarette
東京	とうきょう	トウキョウ	tōkyō	Tokyo, literally meaning "eastern capital"

The first characters that the Japanese used for writing were originally from China. The Kanji, are the characters that first came from China. The Japanese began using these characters between the 3rd and the 5th century. Using someone else's language to describe write things when you are speaking a different language is not that easy and so the Japanese have changed what they use for their writing system quite a bit.


From the original Kanji, which was not the same language as Japanese is what has come to describe the different aspects of the Japanese language specifically verbs, nouns, and adjectives. (Isn't it weird to think that there is a specific word out there that describes the word verbs, nouns and adjectives in most languages?) The Hiragana is used to describe things that are not included in the original Kanji. Word that are difficult to describe and just are obscure in Kanji are written in Hiragana. Katakana are word that are being translated from another language. For example names or elements are described with Katakana.

While the Japanese did take their language from the Chinese originally(Chinese language post) the Japanese did not decide to use the same amount of characters to be included in their written language from the Kanji. They only use around 1850 characters.

The Japanese did not have a real piece of literature for quite some time. When the did they wrote the, "Man'yōgana was initially used to record poetry, as in the Man'yōshū (万葉集^?)."

The Man'yoshu is translated to mean, the collection of ten thousand leaves, this is the oldest volume of poetry in Japan. It is quite and extensive collection of poems and contains 4500 poems in 20 volumes. The Japanese writing techniques are a unique blend of Chinese characters while at the same time having plenty of things that are used only in their language. Something to look at is how much your own written language is composed of many other languages from around the world.