Aviva Trivia

The Japanese writing system is very complex.  In a most basic manner, it can be broken down into three separate facets: Hiragana, Kanji, and Katakana.  Before the fourth century, the Japanese language did not exist.  Then, the Japanese began to incorporate bits of the Chinese script and developed a hybrid.

Kanji are the characters of Chinese origin.  They are most likely the most complicated and difficult of the Japanese script.  The Chinese ideograms used by Kanji are used to represent an entire concept or idea rather than a single sound.  Kanji is often used to express the names of people, the names of places, and many nouns.

Both Hiragana and Katakana are syllabic scripts.  Modern Japanese also incorporates romaji, which are Roman letters and eimoji, which is English script.  Katakana is angular, contains forty-six distinctly different characters, and is used to express almost any sound.  Quite often, Katakana is used for foreign names, foreign words, new words, and company names.

Hiragana is not as angular as Katakana, but rather, is smoother and contains many curves.  Many of the characters, however, appear to be similar to each other.  Hiragana is used to express particles of speech, simple words, and verb conjugation endings.