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Kanji (漢字, Japanese pronunciation:) are the logographic Chinese characters adapted from the Chinese script used in the writing of Japanese. [1] They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequently-derived syllabic scripts of hiragana and katakana.
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana.Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis.
Another notable example is sakazuki "sake cup", which may be spelt as at least five different kanji: 杯, 盃, 巵/卮, and 坏; of these, the first two are common—formally 杯 is a small cup and 盃 a large cup. Local dialectical readings of kanji are also classified under kun'yomi, most notably readings for words in Ryukyuan languages.
This article should specify the language of its non-English content, using {}, {{transliteration}} for transliterated languages, and {} for phonetic transcriptions, with an appropriate ISO 639 code. Wikipedia's multilingual support templates may also be used.
Chinese characters are logograms constructed with strokes. Over the millennia a set of generally agreed rules have been developed by custom. Minor variations exist between countries, but the basic principles remain the same, namely that writing characters should be economical, with the fewest hand movements to write the most strokes possible.
Analogous orthographic conventions find occasional use in English, which, being more familiar, help in understanding okurigana. As an inflection example, when writing Xing for cross-ing, as in Ped Xing (pedestrian crossing), the -ing is a verb suffix, while cross is the dictionary form of the verb – in this case cross is the reading of the character X, while -ing is analogous to okurigana.
For example, titles on the spines of books are usually written vertically. When a foreign language film is subtitled into Korean, the subtitles are sometimes written vertically at the right side of the screen. In the standard language (표준어; 標準語) of South Korea, punctuation marks are used differently in horizontal and vertical ...
However, as particles in Japanese directly modify the preceding noun, some Japanese language courses call this the "goal of movement" usage because it marks the goal of the movement. For example, in the sentence 私はうちに帰ります ( Watashi wa uchi ni kaerimasu or "I'm going back home") the goal of the movement is home ( uchi ni ).