Quote:
Originally Posted by sosoo
whats kanji ?
thanx alot for helping  |
Written japanese can be categorised into three types. Katakana, Hiragana and Kanji. Katakana and hiragana are phonetic characters. So one character will represent the sound 'no' another will represent the sound 'ka', etc. Katakana is used for sounds and foreign loan words, hiragana is used for native japanese vocabulary. Kanji is adapted from Chinese characters (or Hanzi), and instead of representing phonetics, a kanji character represents an entire word.
So 空 is the Kanji for sky, 川 is river, 赤 is red, 木 is tree and 風 is wind. Kanji can be replaced by the phonetic sounds (hiragana).
So 空 is pronounced 'sora'. The hiragana for 'so' is そ and the hiragana for 'ra' is ら. So we can replace 空 with そら if we want. Similarly, 風 is pronounced 'kaze'. So we can replace it with the hiragana for 'ka' (か) and 'ze' (ぜ), giving かぜ.
As for katakana, an example would be ベースボール (be-subo-ru). When spoken, this sounds like baseball and is an english loan word. The lines indicate elongated phonetics.
If you're interested in learning Japanese, learn the hiragana and katakana first as there are only around 40 of each of these, so it shouldn't take too long to learn. Kanji however have loads as you can imagine, since there's lots of words to be represented!