Written Japanese

I had no idea the Japanese written language was so intricate (and interesting!). It seems more of an art form than language. I have heard that Japanese poetry is really beautiful because there is a lot of flexibility in the written language.

There are three types of characters used for Japanese.  Sometimes they are presented separately, but often mixed within a phrase or sentence.  The explanation below is probably way over simplified, but gives the general idea.

Japanese language evolved originally without a written component.  The written language has three types of lettering; kanji, hiragana and katakana.  Kanji was borrowed from Chinese language and consist of characters that represent ideas, such as 川 (kawa, "river") and 学校 (gakkō, "school").  Scott and I can recognize about a dozen kanji characters, but even that helps.

To be fluent, you'd need to know about 2,000 kanji characters.  The words are often made up of combinations of simpler characters that can be pulled apart.  Here is a  sample.

Kanji characters

Since not all Japanese words have an equivalent kanji character, there are two other forms; hiragana and katakana.  They were derived  from kanji.  Hiragana was developed for native Japanese words.  The characters are very curvy and each one represents a sound.  Note that in Japanese language you really can't end a word in a consonant so Scott is pronounces Sco-ta.  Meleah is easily pronounced, but is generally Maria.  Hiragana has much fewer characters, the chart below are all of them.

Hiragana characters

Katakana was developed for foreign words and each character represents a syllable, such as コンピュータ (konpyūta, "computer") and ロンドン (Rondon, "London").  Some words have been adopted from English, such as Tシャツ (tī shatsu, "T-shirt").  These are really tricky, but if you can start to hear these words it is very helpful.  For instance the word for coffee is Ko He, コー​​ヒー.

Nowadays English has also slipped in for words like wi-fi or DVD.