What is the Japanese alphabet called?

The Japanese alphabet does not contain letters but, instead, contains characters and, technically, they are not an alphabet but a character set. The characters in the chart below are called Hiragana. Hiragana is the main alphabet or character set for Japanese. Japanese also consists of two other character sets – Kanji (Chinese characters),

What is katakana syllabary?

The Katakana syllabary was derived from abbreviated Chinese characters used by Buddhist monks to indicate the correct pronunciations of Chinese texts in the 9th century.

How are the sounds of the Japanese alphabet ordered?

The sounds of Japanese can be ordered in two official ways, just the way that the alphabet is ordered “a, b, c, d, e, etc etc etc.” The ancient form is the Iroha.

How many kanji characters are in the Japanese alphabet?

Kanji Between 5,000 and 10,000 Chinese characters, or Kanji, are used in written Japanese. An educated person can read about 10,000 Kanji symbols; the government has published a list of 2,000 that it considers basic. The popular SJIS (Shift-JIS) font has 6,355 Kanji ideographs (and 83 Hiragana and 86 Katakana symbols).

Why are there no Chinese characters in the Japanese alphabet?

Initially Chinese characters were not used for writing Japanese, as literacy meant fluency in Classical Chinese, not the vernacular. Eventually a system called kanbun (漢文) developed, which, along with kanji and something very similar to Chinese grammar, employed diacritics to hint at the Japanese translation.

Is hiragana the most important Japanese alphabet?

Hiragana and Kanji cannot claim the same thing, making Hiragana the most important Japanese Alphabet in theory. A Kanji for example can also be written in Hiragana, but we’ll come to that later! For foreign learners, learning Hiragana is the simplest, most useful introduction to gain a basic understanding of the Japanese language.