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Modern Japanese texts are a mixture from kanji,
hiragana and some interspersed katakana. All the three types have got
their very special function. In the following you can find some of the
basic rules in which cases you use the two syllablewritings.
Hiragana
all parts of speech except nouns, verbs and
adjectives
i.e.: good (yoku |
よく), perhaps
(tabun | たぶん),
only (dake |
んだけ)
in some cases nouns, verbs and adjectives (i.e. if
the former kanji became unusual)
i.e.: chair (isu |
いす), fine, clean (kirei |
きれい)
inflected endings of words written in kanji
Katakana
-
foreign words
i.e.: building (biru |
ビル), beer (bīru
| ビール)
-
outlandish words and names (not Chinese and Korean
names, which are written in kanji)
i.e.: america (Amerika |
アメリカ), Goethe (gēte
| ゲーテ)
-
names of animals and plants (especially in sciences)
i.e.: cherry tree (sakura |
サクラ), bonito (maguro |
マグロ), rat, mouse (nezumi |
ネズミ)
-
sometimes female surnames
i.e.: Emi (エミ), Mari (マリ)
-
echoic words like animal sounds, other sounds and
baby talk
-
words from common speech and slang
-
telegrams
The limited usage of katakana causes these words to
be very eye-catching. This effects is often used in commercials and
might be comparable to words in italics of western languages.
One basic rule while transcribing foreign words or names in katakana is
that the pronunciation should be very close to the original (usually
English words). Often it is hard to find, which of the katakana sounds
is the matching one, that's why different writing might occur.
There are a lot of sounds, which don't have an equivalent in Japanese
katakana so that they have to be built with combinations. Since there is
no sound for L in Japanese, R is used instead. |