The Writing System
The Scripts
Japanese
consists of two scripts (referred to as kana) called Hiragana and Katakana,
which are two versions of the same set of sounds in the language. Hiragana and
Katakana consist of a little less than 50 "letters", which are
actually simplified Chinese characters adopted to form a phonetic script.
Chinese
characters, called Kanji in Japanese, are also heavily used in
the Japanese writing. Most of the words in the Japanese written language are
written in Kanji (nouns, verbs, adjectives). There exists over 40,000 Kanji
where about 2,000 represent over 95% of characters actually used in written
text. There are no spaces in Japanese so Kanji is necessary in distinguishing
between separate words within a sentence. Kanji is also useful for
discriminating between homophones, which occurs quite often given the limited
number of distinct sounds in Japanese.
Hiragana is used
mainly for grammatical purposes. We will see this as we learn about particles.
Words with extremely difficult or rare Kanji, colloquial expressions, and
onomatopoeias are also written in Hiragana. It's also often used for beginning
Japanese students and children in place of Kanji they don't know.
While Katakana
represents the same sounds as Hiragana, it is mainly used to represent newer
words imported from western countries (since there are no Kanji associated with
words based on the roman alphabet). The next three
sections will cover Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji.
Intonation
As you will find out
in the next section, every character in Hiragana (and the Katakana equivalent)
corresponds to a [vowel] or [consonant + vowel] syllable sound with the single
exception of the 「ん」 and 「ン」 characters (more on this later). This system
of letter for each syllable sound makes pronunciation absolutely clear with no
ambiguities. However, the simplicity of this system does not mean that
pronunciation in Japanese is simple. In fact, the rigid structure of the fixed
syllable sound in Japanese creates the challenge of learning proper intonation.
Intonation of high and low pitches is a
crucial aspect of the spoken language. For example, homophones can have
different pitches of low and high tones resulting in a slightly different sound
despite sharing the same pronunciation. The biggest obstacle for obtaining
proper and natural sounding speech is incorrect intonation. Many students often
speak without paying attention to the correct enunciation of pitches making
speech sound unnatural (the classic foreigner's accent). It is not practical to
memorize or attempt to logically create rules for pitches, especially since it
can change depending on the context or the dialect. The only practical approach
is to get the general sense of pitches by mimicking native Japanese speakers
with careful listening and practice.