Japanese

The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

Spoken

Written

Direction

Kana

Kanji

Readings (kun and on)

Radicals

Other details

Romaji

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

The Japanese you see in the west is often romanized - written into Latin alphabet using rōmaji (some people misspell it romanji). Western courses will often use romaji, since it deals directly with speaking and separates learning the kana (and later kanji, often using furigana/ruby characters).

There are a number of different romanization systems, differing mostly in how vowel lengthening is written. Some specifically avoid all ambiguity in parsing and/or reverse transliteration.

Most of these romanizations are somewhat lossful transformation in that there are a few cases where different kana have the same pronunciation, and so are also romanized the same way. It should be understood that Romaji are somewhat approximate and that more than one romanization may be acceptable. (For example, some use 'katagana' interchangably with 'katakana.')