How The Contemporary Japanese Writing System Works
For some time now, I’ve wanted to write an in-depth guide into how the contemporary Japanese writing system works. Over time, throughout my publications, I’ve been able to write short introductions here or there. But there hasn’t been a chance (or, to be honest, a need) to write an overview that goes into the extent that I want… especially given that most academic journals have pretty strict word limits.
Since this itch has never gone away though, I’ve decided that I might as well create the kind of overview I’ve always wanted to on this blog. So that’s what this is, an attempt at a (fairly) complete yet (fairly) accessible guide to how kanji, hiragana, and katakana are used in contemporary written Japanese. I’m sure some eagle-eyed reader will note something I left out, and that will perhaps inspire their own blog post. But minimally I hope to produce something that is of interest to people who know little Japanese, informative to those who know a lot, and will scratch my itch to write this dang overview so I never have to do it again! So with that said, let’s kick things off with …
Contemporary Japanese is written using an interplay of three primary scripts: kanji, hiragana, katakana. Romaji (the Latin/Roman alphabet) also plays some important roles, indeed not knowing it would make a Japanese person’s life quite hard, but I’m going to avoid talking about it too much in this blog.
