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In works aimed at adult Japanese speakers, furigana may be used on a word written in uncommon kanji; in the mass media, they are generally used on words containing non-Jōyō kanji. Furigana commonly appear alongside kanji names and their romanizations on signs for railway stations, even if the pronunciation of the kanji is commonly known.
When more than one historical spelling is given for a particular modern spelling, the various historical spellings were etymologically (and at one point phonetically) distinct and occurred in different words (i.e. in most cases, they are not merely different ways to spell the same word). The tables are sorted using the gojūon ordering system.
The list below shows the Japanese readings of letters in Katakana, for spelling out words, or in acronyms. For example, NHK is read enu-eichi-kē ( エヌ・エイチ・ケー ) . These are the standard names, based on the British English letter names (so Z is from zed , not zee ), but in specialized circumstances, names from other languages ...
A simple example uses the character 高 (high) to express the four basic cases of a Japanese adjective. The root meaning of the word is expressed via the kanji (高, read taka and meaning "high" in each of these cases), but crucial information (aspect and negation) can only be understood by reading the okurigana following the kanji stem. 高い ...
Hiragana, the main Japanese syllabic writing system, derived from a cursive form of man'yōgana, a system where Chinese ideograms were used to write sounds without regard to their meaning. Originally, the same syllable (more precisely, mora ) could be represented by several more-or-less interchangeable kanji, or different cursive styles of the ...
With a few exceptions, such as for the three particles は (pronounced instead of ), へ (pronounced instead of ) and (written を instead of お), Japanese when written in kana is phonemically orthographic, i.e. there is a one-to-one correspondence between kana characters and sounds, leaving only words' pitch accent unrepresented.
Kungana (訓仮名, translation kana): magana for transcribing Japanese words, using Japanese translations ascribed to kanji (native "readings" or kun'yomi). For example, Yamato (大和) would be spelt as 八間跡, with three magana with kun'yomi for ya, ma and to; likewise, natsukashi (懐かし, evoking nostalgia) spelt as 夏樫 for natsu ...
In addition to native words and placenames, kanji are used to write Japanese family names and most Japanese given names. Centuries ago, hiragana and katakana, the two kana syllabaries, derived their shapes from particular kanji pronounced in the same way. However, unlike kanji, kana have no meaning, and are used only to represent sounds.