Guest Blog: Three Alphabets and Five Thousand Ideograms

Hello, readers! I'm Elle of easyusabledesign.blogspot.com, and I'm here today to tell you a little about what I've learned about Japanese.

Japanese is one of those languages that most people know is hard to learn, but only the people who have tried to learn it really know why. There are a lot of reasons why, actually, but today I'll be focusing mainly on the different aspects of Japanese's written language.

Historically, the Japanese language didn't actually have a written language when it was created. And even when they did integrate a written language, it was piggybacked off of an already existing language- namely, Chinese (Japanese Language, 2012). After two thousand years of adapting the Chinese characters for their own uses, only about five thousand kanji are commonly used in the Japanese language (How many kanji are there? 2012), and of these only about 40% retain are actually based off of Chinese counterparts (Japanese Language History, 2012).

Consider this kanji:
家

In both Japanese and Chinese, this character means "house". However, combine the character with the character for large, 大, to make 大家, and suddenly you've got "everyone" in Chinese and several distinct meanings in Japanese- "expert", "landlord/lady", or "rich family" (Ahlstrom, 2012).

More recently, Japanese has adopted two alphabets, used for various reasons- カタカナ, or katakana, andひらがな, hiragana. Katakana is typically used to phonetically spell out loanwords from other languages, while hiragana is used to write out particles of speech and write out pronunciations for kanji. Unlike Kanji, each character in katakana or hiragana represents a phoneme. Katakana's characters tend to be sharper, whereas hiragana's tend to be more rounded.

Lastly, I present to you the least often used of the different Japanese alphabets- Romaji. It's a bit of a stretch (to me, at least) to call it an alphabet on its own, seeing as it is the Latin alphabet exactly, but it is typically used to introduce non-Japanese speakers to the phonetics of Japanese words while skipping the added task of learning an entirely new alphabet.

So here, we have the word "House" written in all four of the different Japanese writing styles:

家 (Kanji)
うち (Hiragana)
ウチ (Katakana)
Uchi (Romaji)

Thanks for reading!

Sources:
Ahlstrom, Kim. Denshi Jisho. (2012) Retrieved from jisho.org.
Japanese Language History. (2012) Retrieved from http://www.foreigntranslations.com/languages/japanese-translation/japanese-language-history/.
Japanese Language. (2012) Retrieved from http://www.japanese-name-translation.com/site/japanese_article.html.
How many kanji are there? (2012) Retrieved from http://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/how-many-kanji.html.