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Vincent told me to put these here, so here they are.

Writing system of Japan.


This is HIRIGANA, the most traditional of the writing systems. This is used to write out most gramatical things, such as verb endings and pronouns and participles. It is also used for some words of strict Japanese origin. Although you probably could just write out all words in Japanese using just this system, nowadays most is written out in KANJI and KATAKANA, which shall be epxlained later. Notice the cursive flowing style of these characters.

This is KATAKANA, the most recent system developed once Matthew Perry and the infamous "Black Ships" arrived. It was originally developed to write out words from foreign laguages, such as CALIFORNIA or MUFFIN or VIDEO PLAYER. (Although I highly doubt they had those back then ^^ Most words are spelled and pronounced exactly the same way as they are in their foriegn counterparts, i.e. CALIFORNIA is KARUFORUNIA and pronounced the same. Notice how this set is more angular and blocky.

And this would be the bane of every student of Japanese' existince, the dreaded Chinese KANJI. While Japan and CHina were at war (for the millionth time) centuries upon centuries ago, the Japanese took many things as their spoils of victory, INCLUDING language tools, such as the Chinese writing system known as Kanji. Each one of these super blocky and fancy symbols is equivalent to about 2-7 hirigana or katakana. You may think this does not sound hard, but the fact that it is only one of over 2,000 Chinese kanji used by the Japanese will make your head spin just thinking of memorizing all of them. Most Japanese by the time they are my age (17) have already memorized all of these Chinese ideographs for the rest of their lives. Meanwhile, I merely only know about 100 at very most. I guess I should be thankful tho that they didn't take ALL of the kanji, because that would require me learning and memorizing over 25,000 of these guys. (Yes, the Chinese are pretty much insane with that in mind, no offense.) BTW, this particluar kanji I used for an example is KIN, which means GOLD.


NIHONGO DESU KA?
Looks like English, but this is actual just the last of our writing sets, the ROMANJI. As the name would suggest, it's just Japanese written out using English letters. Pretty simple stuff.

If you look in the threads there is someone explaing how to get Japanese text to run on your computer

Small note~ ^^ Gold is kin. Silver is gin.

I think that Macs have it on them already.. And Windows XP you have to download something and fix Regional Settings or something. I have XP and I can see Japanese text but I can't type it! ;_;

I was wondering if anyone has access to the double hiragana sounds. For example:

= Kya

I've found a couple of websites that have the information I'm looking for (such as the one I've taken the image from) but not only would I like to have one page with all the characters, but I'd like to double check the internet findings. I am seriously uninterested in learning Japanese characters and character pronunciation incorrectly.

Cool! I never knew that!

これは 平仮名 ですね。


NJStar Communicator is pretty good.