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Most Japanese sentences (like "the cat sat on the mat") contain both kanji and hiragana. Kanji is used for nouns (words like "cat" or "mat") and the stems of verbs (words like "sat"), and hiragana for the endings of verbs and for grammatical particles (small, common words such as the Japanese equivalents to the English "on" and "to"). Foreign borrowings are normally spelled in katakana.
Kanji (漢字) are used for:
nouns
stems of adjectives and verbs
Japanese names.
Hiragana (平仮名) are used to write:
inflectional endings for adjectives and verbs (okurigana 送り仮名)
grammatical particles (joshi 助詞)
words that lack a kanji, where the kanji is obscure, difficult to typeset, is considered too difficult (as in children's books)
phonetic renderings of kanji pronunciation (furigana 振り仮名). Furigana may aid children or nonnative speakers or clarify nonstandard, rare, or ambiguous readings.
Katakana (片仮名) are used to write:
foreign words and names
commonly used animals, plants or objects whose kanji are rare, such as "tokage" (lizard), "bara" (rose), "rōsoku" (candle)
onomatopoeia
emphasis, much like italicisation in European languages
technical and scientific terms, such as plant, animal, and mineral names.
The Latin alphabet (ローマ字) is used to write:
Latin-alphabet acronyms and initialisms, such as NATO or UFO
Japanese personal names, corporate brands, and other words intended for international use (for example, on business cards, in passports, etc.)
foreign names, words, and phrases, often in scholarly contexts
foreign words deliberately rendered to impart a foreign flavour, for instance, in commercial contexts
For more details on this topic, see rōmaji.
Hentaigana, a set of archaic kana obsoleted by the Meiji reformation, are sometimes used to impart an archaic flavour, such as in items of foods.
The above rules have many exceptions. For example, Japanese names may be written in kanji, hiragana, katakana, or some combination thereof. Some foreign borrowings that have been naturalized early or rendered with kanji may be not rendered in katakana. Arabic numerals are commonly used to write numbers in horizontal text.
[edit]Choice
Japanese mainly use hiragana or kanji, while katakana is used to translate a foreign word to Japanese characters. The choice of which type of writing to use depends on a number of factors, including standard conventions, readability, and stylistic choices.
Some Japanese words are written with different kanji depending on the specific usage of the word — for instance, the word "naosu" (to fix, or to cure) is written 治す when it refers to curing a person, and 直す when it refers to fixing an object.
Script usage also reflects grammaticalisation. Japanese has many compound verbs, as in "go and ask" (行って聞く ittekiku?), and, as indicated above, in Japanese orthography lexical items are generally written with kanji (here 行く and 聞く), while grammatical items are written with hiragana (as in the connecting て). Compound verbs are thus generally written with a kanji for each constituent verb, but some suffixes have become grammaticalized, and are written in hiragana, such as "try out, see" (〜みる -miru?), from "see" (見る miru?), as in "try eating (it) and see" (食べてみる tabetemiru?).
[edit]Direction of writing