Japanese Script
Hiragana (ひらがな) is one of the two Japanese syllabaries termed as kana (the other syllabary is called katakana). There are four Japanese writing systems namely hiragana, katakana , kanji and rōmaji.
Kanji are Chinese characters used to write certain parts of the Japanese language. Kanji have different semantic value in Japanese than they have in Chinese, but phonetically they are the same. There are literally thousands of kanji characters, but as an example the kanji for the term “shodan” would be 初段.
Kana were developed as an alternative and adjunct to ideographic based characters called Kanji. Katakana (“partial kana”) is most commonly used to write foreign words that do not have kanji representation while Hiragana (“smooth kana”) is used to indicate grammatical aspects of the language and to represent an entire word in Japanese in place of kanji. Kana can be written in small form above or next to kanji in order to show pronunciation and this is called furigana.
Rōmaji is a Japanese term for the Latin alphabet. In English usage rōmaji refers to the romanization of Japanese words like the Japanese phrase in my previous post. In Japanese writing, however, it is used for abbreviations, metric measurements or to clarify the spelling of foreign names.
If it sounds a bit daunting to you, I agree, it is. But it also makes for an interesting challenge. At the moment I am learning to read and write hiragana and I hope to understand some of the text written in a Yu-Gi-Oh comic book that I borrowed from a friend as it has furigana in it. I also found this hiragana chart on the net after doing a quick search on Google images. And so, finally, “I am a student” (“watashi wa gakusei desu”) in hiragana is わたしは がくせい です．
Hiragana chart image found at Seattle Central Community College
October 17th, 2005 at 3:39 pm
oh no… my PC just froze and the comment I was writing disapeared !
かなしい ないちゃう。
And since I forgot what I was writing (it’s Monday) … I’ll just go for now
The add for my blog is above. I hope you don’t get mad at the picture I posted..(I had a little fun with it few minutes ago)
Chao
November 14th, 2005 at 9:45 pm
[…] Katakana (カタカナ), the other of the two Japanese syllabaries, are characterized by short straight and angular corners and are the simplest of the Japanese scripts. The main uses of katakana in modern Japanese are onomatopoeia, technical/scientific terms, transcription of words from foreign languages and emphasis (roughly analogous to italics in English). […]
July 26th, 2007 at 11:23 pm
j’aime yu-gi-oh
September 8th, 2007 at 2:56 am
quero copiar meu nome em japones
January 5th, 2008 at 2:32 am
i am interested in finding out the correct japanese writing script for a warrior banner i was told about while visiting japan it sounds like foo lin ka zan i think it means something like fire water wind mountain or forest any helpl with this would be greatly appreciated
February 22nd, 2008 at 11:08 am
Hi, can someone assist me in writing my name in Japanese, I want to have it done on my Karate Gi.
Thanks
Dalon
February 24th, 2008 at 5:23 am
ダロン [ダロン] ＜－－ Daron
March 4th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
Raul, I am not familiar with the warrior banner. It is possible that it could be a form of Yojijukugo (four-character (kanji) compounds that have a particular idiomatic meaning). Here is a page with a whole heap of them that might have what you are looking for.
Thomas, thanks for the contribution!
July 31st, 2009 at 12:17 am
Thank you, great post. I’ve been teaching myself Katakana for a couple weeks now, the chart you posted is fantastic.
July 31st, 2009 at 5:22 am
[…] Teaching yourself Katakana? This Katakana cheat sheet from the Shodan Blog might be useful. Thanks to VSC member ソロドライバー for the link! (I’ll let you use the chart to translate his name for yourself)* Katakana Chart of Characters […]