A guide to writing japanese kanji kana

A guide to writing japanese kanji kana A guide to writing japanese kanji kana A guide to writing japanese kanji kana A guide to writing japanese kanji kana A guide to writing japanese kanji kana A guide to writing japanese kanji kana A guide to writing japanese kanji kana A guide to writing japanese kanji kana

d Horizontal stroke before

e X-forming strokes: from upper

right to lower left, then from

f Piercing vertical stroke last

乥书 乧 乨 乩 买 乱

If the vertical middle stroke

does not protrude, upper part,

then middle stroke, then lower

part

乲乴

g Piercing horizontal stroke last

乵乶乷乸These handwriting rules for the stroke direction and order apply to kana as well as kanji For a more-detailed explanation of kanji writing rules, see the summary on pages 46–48

Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of

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Copyright © 2012 by Wolfgang Hadamitzky

and Mark Spahn

All rights reserved No part of this publication

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storage and retrieval system, without prior

written permission from the publisher

Third edition, 2011

Second edition, 1997

First edition, 1981

German language edition published in 1979

by Verlag Enderle GmbH, Tokyo; in 1980 by

Langenscheidt KG, Berlin and Munich

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Data for this title is available

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Preface 6

Introduction 8

Romanization 10

The Kana Syllabaries 14

Origin 14

Order 18

Writing 23

Orthography 26

Usage 30

Punctuation 34

The Kanji 40

Brief Historical Outline 40

From Pictures to Characters 42

Readings 44

Rules for Writing Kanji 46

Lexical Order 53

Tips on Learning Kanji 66

Explanation of the Jōyō Kanji Entries 68

The Jōyō Kanji List 69

Index by Radicals 377

Index by Stroke Count 387

Index by Readings 395

List of Tables 1 The Syllabaries (inside front cover) 2 Basic Rules for Writing by Hand (front endpaper) (( 3 Transliteration (Hepburn romanization) 12

4 Hiragana Derivations 16

5 Katakana Derivations 17

6 Alphabetical order of the syllables of the Fifty-Sounds Table and supplementary table 20

7 Example of Dictionary Order 21

8 The Iroha Syllable Order 22

9 How to Write Hiragana 24

10 How to Write Katakana 25

11 Important Katakana Combinations 29

12 Punctuation Marks 39

13 The 79 Radicals (with variants) 57

14 The 214 Traditional Radicals 58

15 The Most Important of the 214 Traditional Radicals 60

16 The 214 Traditional Radicals and Their Meanings 61

17 The 80 Graphemes (without variants) 65

18 The 79 Radicals (without variants)

(back endpaper)

19 Checklist for Determining the Radical

of a Character (inside back cover)

Fourteen years after it was last revised, this standard work of the Japanese writing system hasbeen expanded and completely updated The main part of the book now lists 2,141 kanji (for-merly 1,945) In addition, with its 19 tables, it presents a fresh, modern design.

A feature of this handbook is its double usefulness as both a textbook and a reference work

It serves beginners as well as those who want to look up individual kanji via the three indexes And the many tables provide a quick overview of all important aspects of the Japanese writingsystem

The information is so organized and presented – the pronunciation of each character isspelled out in roman letters – as to allow easy entry into the Japanese writing system for be-ginners and those who are learning on their own, providing the background anyone needs to know to become able to read Japanese without constantly looking up one kanji after another.All the information about the hiragana and katakana syllabaries and the kanji is based onthe official orthography rules of the Japanese government The 2,141 kanji listed in the main part of this book include the 2,136 characters of the “Revised List of Kanji for General Use” (改定常用漢字表, 2010) as well as five further kanji that were dropped from the official list that was ineffect up to 2010

This work is divided into three parts:

1 Introductory chapters

A general introduction to transliteration is followed by a presentation of the two sets of netic characters, the hiragana and the katakana (called collectively the kana) Then comes asection devoted to punctuation Next is a general introduction to the world of the ideographiccharacters, the kanji: how they arose, how they are put together, how to write them, how to read (pronounce) them, what they mean, how to find them in a character dictionary, and tipsfor how to learn them effectively

pho-2 List of the 2,136 Jōyō Kanji

The bulk of the book is made up of the official list of the 2,136 Jōyō Kanji The order of sentation is based on pedagogical principles, proceeding from simple, frequent kanji to thosethat are more complex and occur less often Within this general framework, characters that aregraphically similar are presented together in order to call attention to their similarities and dif-ffferences in form, reading, and meaning

pre-Each head-kanji is set in a modern, appealing font, and is accompanied by: its running cation number from 1 to 2141, how it is written (stroke by stroke) and its stroke-count; its read-ings and corresponding meanings; its handwritten form and variants; its structure and graphiccomponents; its radical; and its location in more-comprehensive character dictionaries

identifi-Under each head-kanji are listed up to five important compounds with reading and meaning.These compounds are made up of earlier-listed characters having lower identification numbers

this book will make it easier for you to build up a vocabulary while reviewing what you havelearned before Each compound is labeled with the numbers of its constituent kanji, for quick review lookup.

In all, the kanji list and compounds contain a basic Japanese vocabulary of over 12,000 words

pre-Buckow, Germany, August 2011 Wolfgang Hadamitzky

www.hadamitzky.de West Seneca, New York, USA, August 2011 Mark Spahn

Further study aids and dictionaries by the authors on the Japanese writing system

A Guide to Writing Japanese Kanji & Kana Books 1, 2 1991

Writing templates for the kana syllabaries and the kanji 1 to 1945

Kanji in Motion (KiM) 2011

Game and tutorial program Trains the user for rapidly recognizing and reading all kana and Jōyō Kanji

KanjiVision (KV) 2012

Web-based Japanese-English character dictionary Contains about 6,000 head-kanji and 48,000 multi-kanji compound words Search options: by grapheme (up to six per character), reading(in romanization or kana), meaning, stroke-count, and kanji (copied from other sources)

Japanese is written in a mixture (called kanji-kana majiri ) of three types of symbols, each with

its own function:

letters are pronounced as in English), and in horizontal writing, numbers are usually written with Hindu-Arabic numerals rather than with kanji

There has never been an independent, purely Japanese system of writing Around the seventh century the attempt was first made to use Chinese characters to represent Japanese speech In the ninth century the Japanese simplified the complex Chinese ideographs into what are now the two sets of kana (hiragana and katakana) Each of these kana syllabaries encompasses all the syllables that occur Japanese, so it is quite possible to write exclusively

in kana, just as it would be possible to write Japanese exclusively in romanization In practice,however, this would hamper communication due to the large number of words that are pro-nounced alike but have different meanings; these homophones are distinguished from each other by being written with different kanji

Japanese today is written either in vertical columns proceeding from right to left or in zontal lines which are read from left to right The traditional vertical style is seen mostly in liter-ary works The horizontal European style, recommended by the government, is found more inscientific and technical literature Newspapers use both styles: most articles are written verti-cally, headlines and advertisements appear in both styles, and radio and television programlistings are laid out horizontally

hori-Handwritten Japanese may be written either vertically or horizontally For writing practice

it is recommended that the beginner use either manuscript paper (genkō yōshi), which has

space for either 200 or 400 characters per page, or the practice manuals that accompany thistext There, each kana, and each kanji from 1 to 1945, is presented twice in gray for tracing over,followed by empty spaces for free writing

another; the characters of a single word are not strung together, nor are any blank spaces leftbetween words Here the conventions governing the use of kanji and kana for different types

of words aid the reader in determining where one word ends and the next begins

All the characters within a text are written in the same size; there is no distinction analogous

to that between capital and lowercase letters

As with roman letters, there are a few differences between the printed and handwrittenforms, which sometimes makes character recognition difficult for the beginner In order to fa-miliarize the student with these differences, each of the 2,141 kanji presented in the main sec-tion of this book and in the practice manuals appears in three ways: in brush form, in a model handwritten form, and in printed form Within the printed forms of kanji, there are various type-faces, but the differences between them are usually insignificant

In handwriting (with brush or pen), three styles are distinguished:

1 The standard style (kaisho), which is taught as the norm in school and is practically identical

to the printed form All the handwritten characters in this volume are given in the standardstyle

2 The semicursive style (gyōsho), a simplification of the standard style that allows one to write

more flowingly and rapidly

3 The cursive style or “grass hand” (sōsho), which is a kind of calligraphic shorthand resulting

from extreme simplification according to esthetic standards

And in practice, several frequently occurring characters are sometimes used in greatly plified forms which are not officially recognized; for example, the characte 門 is sometimes simplified to ', 曜to Ñ, and第 to )

sim-And let it be noted that there is also a Japanese shorthand intended for purely practicalrather than artistic purposes

Since the 1980s Japanese has been written less often by brush, pencil, and pen, and more often by keyboard But even if your goal is simply to be able to read, and the need to eventually write Japanese by hand seems slight, writing practice is still worthwhile, because it familiarizesyou with the characters, fixes them in your mind, and gets you to notice details that can help in recognizing characters and being able to look them up in a character dictionary And perhapswriting practice will stimulate an interest in calligraphy, one of the oldest of the Japanese arts

Writing Japanese with the same roman letters as in English presents no problems; the Japanese language can easily be transliterated using only 22 roman letters and two diacritical marks.

So why haven’t the Japanese adopted such an alphabet to replace a system of writing which even they find difficult? The answer lies in the large number of homophones, especially

in the written language: even in context it is frequently impossible to uniquely determine thesense of a word without knowing the characters it is written with Other rational as well as more emotional considerations, including a certain inertia, make it very unlikely that the Japanesewriting system will undergo such a thorough overhaul

In 1952 the Japanese government issued recommendations for the transliteration of nese into roman letters Two tables (on pages 12 and 13) summarize the two recommended systems of romanization, which are both in use today and differ only slightly from each other:

Japa-1 The kunrei-shiki rōmaji system

Patterned after the Fifty-Sounds Table in which the kana syllables are arranged, the initial consonant sound of all five syllable in each row is represented uniformly with the same ro-man letter, regardless of any phonetic variation associated with the different vowel sounds

2 The Hebon-shiki rōmaji system i

This romanization system too follows the kana characters The Hebon-shiki was developed i

by a commission of Japanese and foreign scholars in 1885 and was widely disseminated a year later through its use in a Japanese-English dictionary compiled by the American mis-

sionary and philologist James Curtis Hepburn (in Japanese: Hebon) In Hepburn

romaniza-tion the consonant sounds are spelled as in English, and the vowel sounds as in Italian

The Japanese government romanization recommendations of 1952 favor kunrei-shiki rōmaji, but explicitly allow the use of Hebon-shiki rōmaji, especially in texts for foreigners The

Hepburn system allows an English speaker to approximate the original Japanese tion without the need to remember any unfamiliar pronunciation rules, and is therefore less likely to lead a non-Japanese into mispronunciation A good illustration of this is the name of

pronuncia-Japan’s sacred mountain, which is spelled Fuji in the Hepburn system but misleadingly as i Huzi

in the kunrei system That is why the transliterations in this book are spelled with Hepburn ro i manization

-The following transliteration rules are taken from the official recommendations -The ples as well as the remarks in parentheses have been added

exam-1 The end-of-syllable soundん is always written n (even when it appears before the labials b,

p, or m and is phonetically assimilated to m: konban, kanpai, kanmuri).

2 When needed to prevent mispronunciation, an apostrophe [ ’ ] is inserted to separate the

end-of-syllable sound n from a following vowel or y: man’ichi, kon ’ ’yaku ’’

nants: mikk ii k a, ma ssugu, hatten, kipp ii u: sh becomes ssh, ch become tch, and ts becomes tts:

ressha, botchan, mitts tt u.

4 Long vowels are marked with a circumflex [^] (this does not correspond to the kana raphy), and if a long vowel is capitalized, it may be doubled instead (In practice the simpler

orthog-macron [ ¯ ] has become prevalent: mā, y ā ūjin, d ū ōzo The lengthening of i and (in words of i

Chinese origin) of e is indicated by appending an i: oniisan ii , meishi ii i (but:onēsan) In foreign

words and names written in katakana, the long vowels i and i e are written with a macron if

in the original Japanese they are represented by a lengthening stroke [ー]: ビールbīru, īī メー

5 For the representation of certain sounds there are no binding rules (Short, sudden

broken-off vowels at the end of a word or syllable – glottal stops, or soku-on – are denoted in this

book by adding an apostrophe: a’, are ’ ’, ji ’ ’.) ’

6 Proper names and the first word of every sentence are capitalized The capitalization of

substantives is optional: Ogenki desu ka? Nippon, Tōkyō, T Tanaka, T Genji Monogatari, Kanji K or

more kanji should be partitioned into units of two or three kanji each:源氏物語Genji

But we will refrain from any further discussion of proper romanization, which in any case is just a side-issue in a work whose aim is to get the learner as soon as possible to the passive andactive mastery of the original Japanese text

The characters (kanji) in Chinese texts brought into Japan via Korea beginning in the fourth century gradually came to be adopted by the Japanese for writing their own language, for which there was no native system of writing The characters were used phonetically to repre-sent similar-sounding Japanese syllables; the meanings of the characters were ignored In this way one could represent the sound of any Japanese word But since each Chinese charactercorresponded to only one syllable, in order to write a single multisyllabic Japanese word onehad to write several kanji, which frequently consist of a large number of strokes

Hiragana

To simplify this bothersome process, instead of the full angular style (kaisho) of the kanji, a cursive, simplified, derivative style (sōsho) was used In addition, the flowing and expressive lines of the sōsho style were felt to be better suited for literary notation Toward the end of the

Nara period (710–794) and during the Heian period (794–1185) these symbols underwent afurther simplification, in which esthetic considerations played a part, resulting in a stock of phonetic symbols which was extensive enough to represent all the sounds of the Japanese language This was the decisive step in the formation of a purely phonetic system for represent-ing syllables These simple syllable-symbols, today known as hiragana, were formerly referred

to as onna-de, “ladies’ hand,” since they were first used in letters and literary writing by courtly

women of the Heian period, who were ignorant of the exclusively male domain of Chineselearning and literature and the use of Chinese characters But the hiragana gradually came toprevail as a standard syllabary

The hiragana syllabary in use today was laid down in the year 1900 in a decree for tary schools Two obsolete characters were dropped as part of orthographic reforms madeshortly after World War II As a result, today there are 46 officially recognized hiragana

elemen-The now-obsolete kana that were dropped by the above decree, and which were derived

from different kanji, are called hentai-gana (deviant-form kana).

Katakana

The katakana symbols were developed only a little later than the hiragana While listening to lectures on the classics of Buddhism, students wrote in their text notations on the pronuncia-tion or meaning of unfamiliar characters, and sometimes wrote commentaries between the lines of certain passages Doing so required a kind of note-taking shorthand

This practice resulted in the development of a new phonetic script based on Chinese

char-acters, the katakana syllabary Each katakana is taken from one component of a kaisho-style

Chinese character corresponding to a particular syllable This makes the katakana more gular than the hiragana, which are cursive simplifications of entire kanji In a few cases thekatakana is only a slight alteration of a simple kanji: チ (千),ハ(八), ミ (三)

an-angular phonetic symbols were used only by men.

As with the hiragana, the final form of the katakana in use today was prescribed in 1900 in adecree for elementary schools And the number officially recognized katakana is today 46, the same as for hiragana

A kana takes on not just the form of the kanji from which it is derived, but also its adopted

Chinese pronunciation, called its on reading Three kana are exceptions: inチ (千chi ),ミ (三

mittsu), and と/ト(止tomaru), the pronunciation comes not from the on reading of the kanji, but from the first syllable of its native-Japanese kun reading.

The pronunciation of a word written in kanji that the reader might not know how to readcan be specified by marking the kanji with little kana, usually hiragana These annotation kana

for indicating pronunciation are called furigana In horizontal writing they are written above

the kanji, and in vertical writing they are written to the right of the kanji (for examples, see page32)

The derivation tables on the following two pages show which kanji each kana is derived from

The number or (for non-Jōyō-Kanji) descriptor below each kanji tells where its entry can be

found in this book or in the kanji dictionaries by Spahn/Hadamitzky

The number or (for non-Jōyō-Kanji) descriptor below each kanji tells where its entry can be

found in this book or in the kanji dictionaries by Spahn/Hadamitzky

Table 1 (inside the front cover) shows the usual “alphabetical” order of the hiragana and

kataka-na syllable-characters It is based on Indian alphabets which, like the Devakataka-nagari alphabet day, order their syllables according to their articulatory phonetics Around the year 1000 people

to-in Japan began to arrange the Japanese syllables and syllable-characters, which had been to-inuse since early in the Heian period, into a sequence according to their pronunciation following

the Indian example The result was the so-called Fifty-Sounds Table (gojū-on-zu), a syllabary

in which every syllable is assigned a character Of the 46 characters in all, 40 are arranged ingroups of five each that belong together phonetically; five are arranged in corresponding slots

in this arrangement, and one lies outside this arrangement The table appears in two formats:with the named groups arranged either in vertical columns (Table 1), or in horizontal rows (Tables

4 and 5, pages 16 and 17)

In the vertical arrangement, the characters in the Fifty-Sounds Table begin with the right

column and are read from top to bottom Thus the Japanese syllable alphabet begins a, i, u, e, o; ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, … The five characters in each column (dan)are arranged according to their

vowel sounds, in the order a-i-u-e-o, and the ten characters in each row (gyō) are arranged cording to their initial consonant sound, in the order ø k s t n h m y r w.(This is sometimes memo -

ac-rized as a-ka-sa-ta-na, ha-ma-ya-ra-wa in the sing-song musical rhythm of do-re-mi-fa-so, fa-mi-re-do.) This systematic ordering makes it easy to memorize the Japanese aiueo alphabet The end-of-syllable sound n lies outside the scheme of the Fifty-Sounds Table, because purely Japanese words do not use this sound The n was not tacked on to the Fifty-Sounds Table

so-until Chinese characters and their pronunciation made their way into the Japanese language.The Fifty-Sounds Table can be written in either hiragana or katakana The two kana sylla-

baries have no symbols in common (although their he charactersへandヘare nearly guishable), but they denote the same sounds in the same order

indistin-Let it be noted that the major writing systems of the world arrange their characters by any

of three different principles The European alphabets are based on the oldest Semitic alphabet,which is ordered according to meaning and pictorial similarity; the Arabic alphabet is orderedaccording to the form of its characters; while the Devangari alphabet of India, with which San-skrit and Hindi is written, is ordered according to the sounds of the characters Despite theirfundamental differences, the three basic alphabet systems have some commonalities, includ-

ing putting the vowel a at the beginning of the alphabet.

Two diacritical marks make it possible to represent beginning-of-syllable consonants that

cannot be represented by the unmodified kana Thus the “muddied”, that is, voiced sounds g, z,

d, and b (called daku-on) are denoted by putting a mark [ ゛], called a daku-ten or nigori-ten, on the upper right of the corresponding unvoiced kana And the “half-muddied” sound p- (handaku- on) is denoted by putting a mark [゜], called a handaku-ten or maru, on the upper right of the

corresponding h- kana.

Combinations of kana are used to represent some sounds, most of which were adopted

sounds (soku-on: unvoiced doubled consonants, or glottal stop) are written with two kana, the second of which is written smaller; and the one-syllable combination yō-on + soku-on is written

with three kana, the last two of which are written smaller

The assimilated sounds do not appear in the usual syllabary tables Shown here are a few examples of how they are spelled and romanized

あっ　アッ あっか　アッカ あっきゃ　アッキャ

かっ　カッ かっか　カッカ きゃっか　キャッカ

In Japanese, alphabetical order – also known as dictionary order or lexical order – is based

on the Fifty-Sounds Table (see Table 3, pages 12 and 13) But with any alphabet of characters that have variants, when alphabetizing a list of words, we need tie-breaking rules to decide

which of two words comes first when they differ only by length (e.g., china vs chinaware,あな

vs.あなば), by diacritical mark (resume vs résumé,はり vs.ばりvs.ぱり), by character-size (china

vs China, かつて vs.かって), or, in Japanese, by the hiragana/katakana distinction (これら vs

コレラ) One solution (others are possible) is given in Table 6, in which the alphabetical order proceeds down the columns, taking the columns from right to left Table 7 gives examples of words sorted into kana alphabetical order, taking the columns from left to right

One way to get a different alphabetical order from any set of characters is to arrange them

in a “perfect pangram,” in which every character occurs just once For example, the 26 letters

of the English alphabet can be rearranged into the odd sentence “TV quiz jock, Mr PhD, bagsfew lynx.” And something similar happened with the kana during the Heian period: they were arranged into a Buddhist poem, called the Iroha from its first three kana Its first charactersイロハニホヘト are used today for labeling items in sequence, such as subheadings, items in a list,

or the musical keys A to G The Fifty-Sounds Table contains 46 kana, but the Iroha contains 47, because it includes the two now-obsolete kanaゐ(w)i and i ゑ(w)e, and lacks the kana んn.

This Iroha poem is reproduced line by line on page 22, along with a translation

Romanized Japanese can be alphabetized as in English, and this is done in Japanese-foreignlanguage dictionaries

the Fifty-Sounds Table and supplementary table

バ パ

ダ

サ ザ

カ ガ

ア

ビ ピ

ヂ

シ ジ

キ ギ

イ

ビャ ピャ

ニャ チャ シャ

ジャ

キャ ギャ

ビュ ピュ

ニュ チュ シュ

ジュ キュ ギュ

ビョ ピョ

ニョ チョ ショ

ジョ

キョ ギョ

ブ プ

ヅ

ス ズ

ク グ

ウ ヴ

ベ ペ

デ

セ ゼ

ケ ゲ

エ

ボ ポ

The Iroha (Japanese: iroha-uta) was composed as a mnemonic poem in which every kana of the

syllabary occurs only once (Translation by Basil Hall Chamberlain, 1850–1935)

い

i

ろ ro

は ha

に ni

ほ ho

へ he

と to ち

chi

り ri

ぬ nu

る ru

を (w)o わ

wa

か ka

よ yo

た ta

れ re

そ so つ

tsu

ね ne

な na

ら ra

む mu う

u

ゐ (w)i

の no

お o

く ku

や ya

ま ma け

ke

ふ fu

こ ko

え e

て te あ

a

さ sa

き ki

ゆ yu

め me

み mi

し shi ゑ

(w)e

ひ hi

も mo

せ se

す su

The two kana syllabaries are the best first step toward mastering the Japanese writing system,because:

a They are limited in number (46 hiragana, 46 katakana)

b They are simple in form (one to four strokes each)

c There is a one-to-one correspondence between sound and symbol (except for two ters, which each have two readings)

charac-d Each syllabary encompasses all the sounds of the Japanese language, so that any text can

be written down in kana (as is done in books for small children)

It is debatable which set of kana should be learned first Hiragana occur far more frequently, but katakana are used to write words of foreign origin, including English words the beginner might recognize from their Japanese pronunciation

The following two principles govern the sequence and direction in which to write thestrokes of a kana (as well as of a kanji):

1 From top to bottom

2 From left to right

In Tables 9 and 10, the small numbers at the beginning of each stroke indicate the direction

in which each stroke is written, the sequence in which the strokes are written, and how many strokes the kana consists of:

七  0 1 2

Japanese is handwritten not on lines but (even for adults) in a printed or at least imaginary grid of squares In learning how to write, it is recommended that from the beginning you use

Japanese manuscript paper (genkō yōshi) or the practice manuals that accompany this book

Tracing over the gray-tone characters in the practice manuals is the quickest way to get a feel for the proper proportions of each character:

Modern kana orthography (gendai kanazukai) reflects pronunciation closely This section

ex-plains, with examples, the most important orthographic rules

The long vowels (chō-on) ā, ii and i ū are represented by appending あ, い, orう:

Long ē/ei is w i ritten

in words of Japanese readingf (kun), with an appended え:

おねえさん onēsan elder/older sister

in words of Sino-Japanese reading (on), with an appended い:

Long ō is normally represented with an appended う:

In some cases, however,お is appended instead of う:

Assimilated sounds (soku-on), that is, those sound that are represented in romanization by a

doubled consonant, are denoted by a smallっ/ッbefore the consonant sound:

Short, broken-off vowels at the end of a word or syllable (final glottal stops, soku-on) are

like-wise denoted by a smallっ/ッ:

あっ a’ Oh!

まじめ majime serious, sober

ジャズ jazu jazz

Butづ andぢ are used

a when the preceding syllable (of the same word) is the same character without the nigori

mark:

b when the syllable つor ちis voiced to zu or ji in a compound word: i

かなづかい（かな＋つかい） kanazukai kana orthography

きづかれ（き＋つかれ） kizukare mental fatigue

はなぢ（はな＋ち） hanaji nosebleed

Sometimes the spelling rules in a and b are not followed, and tsuzuri and i hanaji appear, and i

are alphabetized in dictionaries, under the spellings つずりand はなじrather than つづりand

But the same three sounds are written へ/ヘ, を/ヲ, andは/ハwhen they represent

postposi-tional “auxiliary words” (joshi):

ポストへいれた。 posuto e ireta. put into the mailbox

こんにちは konnichi wa Hello

The word言う “say” is pronouncedゆう(yū) but writtenいう(iu).

(in ABC alphabetical order)

other-The common rōmaji-to-kana text editors also accept the following variant transliterations forthe following katakana combinations:

The following rules outline how the two syllabaries hiragana and katakana are used.

Hiragana are used to write

a all types of words other than nouns, verbs, and adjectives:

c names of plants and animals (especially in a scientific context):

d some female given names:

エミ Emi

マリ Mari

e onomatopoeic words such as animal cries and other sounds; children’s words; tions:

ニャーニャー nyā nyā meow

ピューピュー pyū pyū (sound of the wind)

アレ／アレッ are/are’ Huh?!

オヤ／オヤッ oya/oya’ Oh!

インチキ inchiki trickery, flimflam, crooked

g words and proper names that are to be emphasized:

もうダメだ mō dame da Too late!

ナゾの自殺 nazo no jisatsu a mysteeerious suicide

The limited usage of katakana makes them stand out and often lends them a certain weight.This high visibility, which is often made use of in advertising, has somewhat the same effectthat italics and capital letters have in Western languages

Both hiragana and katakana are used to show the pronunciation of kanji, like this:

These small kana, written either above or below the kanji in horizontal writing and to the right

of the kanji in vertical writing, are called furigana or rubi.

In transliterating individual kanji, katakana are used for Chinese-derived (on) readings, and ragana for native-Japanese (kun) readings:

hi-人　ジン、ニン、ひと JIN, NIN (on), hito (kun) person

In transliterating foreign words and proper names, the basic rule is that the katakana should follow as closely as possible the pronunciation of the original (usually English) word But de-spite a general trend toward unification of the transliteration rules, some foreign words and names are rendered into katakana in more than one way:

ダーウィン Dāwin Darwin

ジュネーヴ Junēvu Geneva (Fr Genève)

デュッセルドルフ Dyusserudorufu Düsseldorf

ティー tī tea

クォータリー quōtarī quarterly (publication)

For many words, an approximation using only the katakana in the Fifty-Sounds Table is ferred over a more-exact reproduction of the original pronunciation:

ラブレター raburetā love letter

The kana repetition symbols(kurikaeshi fugō)

If within a single word the same kana occurs twice in a row, the second occurrence can be placed with the kana repetition symbol, thus:

This repetition symbol may also be used with a nigori:

The repetition symbol for two syllables is used only in vertical writing: