Japanese Writing Systems
Modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese Characters and syllabic kana. Kana itself consists of pair of syllaberies:
- Hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements;
- Katakana used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names etc;
Almost all written Japanese sentences contain a mixture of kanji and kana. Because of this mixture of scripts, in addition to a large inventory of kanji characters (well over 50,000), the Japanese writing system is considered to be one of the most complicated currently in use.