Japanese
From ZuluNotes - Free Leaving Cert Notes
The Japanese Scripts
Before beginning to study Japanese, you first have to learn the various scripts used.
Japanese uses three:
- Katakana カタカナ
- Hiragana ひらがな
- Kanji 漢字
- Romanji is Japanese written with English characters, and used mainly by foreigners.
- Arabic numerals are numbers as used in western countries they are used more often than the actual kanji for numbers.
- Katakana is used for English words, names and is used extensively in advertising.
- Hiragana is used most frequently for particles, verb endings and other various bits and pieces.
- Kanji are the characters used for nouns, adjective stems and verb stems. You are required to know about 120 for the Leaving Cert. This includes their compounds as relevant to the syllabus.
