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Learning how to write Japanese can be rather intimidating, but it is one of the more interesting parts of learning Japanese. Japanese writing looks almost impossible to decipher for a Westerner that has only used the 26 letter Latin alphabet. While it is true that Japanese is a totally different system, with practice and commitment, it can be mastered over time. One of the first things that you will find in learning how to write Japanese is that there are multiple sets of characters. Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji are the three "alphabets", or character sets, that the Japanese language has. The Kana - Hiragana and Katakana have 46 characters each while there are nearly 5000 Kanji characters in existence. Those numbers may make it sound impossible to learn written Japanese, but if you master the kana, you can write and communicate in Japanese just fine. The two character sets that comprise the kana are 46 characters each and they each represent a single syllable. Hiragana is used for ‘native’ Japanese words and each symbol is a single syllable such as ‘ha’ or ‘ku’. If you want to write a word out that is usually represented by a Kanji symbol, you could use Hiragana to do that. The Katakana symbols are used for foreign words that may not have a Japanese equivalent such as a brand name product or a non-Japanese person's name. Every syllable has an equivalent Hiragana as well as Katakana symbol. The way to tell the two kana sets apart is that Katakana is very angular and Hiragana is much more cured in style. Knowing that will make things easier when figuring out how to write Japanese. After learning the kana, it is on to Kanji which is necessary for you to read and know how to write Japanese. Japanese Kanji characters were adapted from Chinese writing thousands of years ago. There are over 5000 Kanji characters in existence, but to simplify things a bit the Japanese government has created a list of 1945 symbols that are considered essential characters to know. The list is large, but with time one can master enough characters to read a newspaper or book with only the occasional need to look something up. Often times you may not know the Kanji character for a word, but if you know how to write the word in Kana, it will be understood by any Japanese reader. Also when you are first learning and do not know how to write Japanese at all, there is another system called Romaji. Romaji is the ‘Romanization’ of Japanese, or writing it out with the standard 26 letter Latin alphabet. Romaji is actually quite common now, as it is even taught in Japanese schools. An example would be writing out the Japanese word for goodbye as ‘sayonara’. Since most people learn to speak Japanese before reading and writing it, Romaji is a great help to the learning process. With some practice and repetition it is not too difficult to learn, and many people find that learning written Japanese can be more interesting and enjoyable than speaking it.
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