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This page is designed to answer questions regarding Japanese and its use on Wikipedia. If you have trouble viewing Japanese, please see theHelp:Installing Japanese character sets page for assistance for your particular operating system.
Japanesetext is written with a mixture ofkanji,katakana andhiraganasyllabaries. Almost allkanji originated inChina, and may have more than one meaning and pronunciation.Kanji compounds generally derive their meaning from the combined kanji. For example,Tokyo (東京) is written with two kanji: "east" (東) + "capital" (京). The kanji, however, are pronounced differently from their Chinese relatives. For example, in modern Mandarin Chinese, these two kanji would be "Dongjing". The name was chosen because Tokyo was to be the easterncapital ofJapan, relative to its previous capital city,Kyoto (京都). (Some other kanji compounds use characters chosen primarily for their pronunciations. Such characters are calledateji.) In addition to native words andplacenames, kanji are used to write Japanese family names and most Japanese given names.
Centuries ago,hiragana andkatakana, the two kana syllabaries, derived their shapes from particular kanji pronounced in the same way. However, unlikekanji, kana have no meaning, and are used only to represent sounds.Hiragana are generally used to write some Japanese words and given names and grammatical aspects of Japanese. For example, the Japanese word for "to do" (するsuru) is written with twohiragana:す (su) +る (ru).Katakana are generally used to writeloanwords, foreign names andonomatopoeia. For example,retasu was borrowed from the English "lettuce", and is written with three katakana:レ (re) +タ (ta) +ス (su). The onomatopoeia for the sound of typing iskata kata, and is written with 4katakana:カ (ka) +タ (ta) +カ (ka) +タ (ta). It is common nowadays to see many businesses usingkatakana in place ofhiragana andkanji in advertising. Additionally, people may usekatakana when writing their names or informal documents for aesthetic reasons.
Roman characters have also recently become popular for certain purposes in Japanese. (seerōmaji)
ThroughoutWikipedia, a modified version of the widely acceptedHepburn romanization is used to represent Japanese sounds inRoman characters. The following are some basic rules for using Hepburn to pronounce Japanese words accurately.
Japanese vowels can be approximated inEnglish as follows:
| vowel | a | i | u | e | o |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| English approximations | as inarm | as in feet | as in boot | as in hey | as inor |
When a consonant is followed by another of the same letter, the first consonant is written with a chiisai (made-smaller)tsu (つ/ツ). Exception: Double n. In this case, being asn (ん/ン) is a single consonant, it can be written by itself. (Ex: Woman: Onna-おんな)
In Japanese names, thefamily name (surname) always comes before thegiven name. Examples:
However, to reflect the Western convention of listing the given name first and the family name last, the romanized names of most Japanese people born since the establishment of theMeiji era in 1868 conform to the "given name, family name" order. This usage is typically reflected on Wikipedia:Tokugawa Ieyasu (born 1543) is listed atTokugawa Ieyasu, whileFukuda Yasuo (born 1936) is listed atYasuo Fukuda.