The Japanese writing system

You might wonder why the writing system for Japanese has its own section, but this is actually a non-trivial subject. There are three scripts, and the complex chinese character script comes in at least three distinct "flavours" of writing.

This part of the website looks at several aspects of the Japanese writing system, and hopefully serves as information that allows you to appreciate the use of different scripts in a language a bit more. Japanese is a neat language to learn, but if you don't learn what the uses are of the different scripts, and how to work with them in terms of reading, writing and looking up in a dictionary, it's easy to get lost where you don't have to.

This section is under construction, so for now the only section that is up is the section on the various writing styles in Japanese - similar to how in western languages we have gothic, serif, handwritten and print-style lettering, there is a multitude of different font faces in Japan too, and some of these are actually surprisingly important to know something about.

If you think of something that you think belongs in this section but isn't in already planned here, feel free to drop me an email or write a feature suggestion in the forum.

- Pomax