Alphabet (JI)        Back

Do You know that Japanese have to be able to read and write in four kind of alphabets?

Ya, Japanese use four kind of alphabet : Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji, and Latin alphabet. Hiragana is the alphabet which used to write Japanese word and contains 46 characters. Katakana is similar, but it is used to write the word which come from other language, except Chinese. For example : for writing country names.
How about Kanji ? Kanji is the most complicated characters in the world and one character Kanji is a symbol which has a meaning. For example : Tree, Horse, and moon has different Kanji characters. So we can conclude that there must be many Kanji characters. All of Kanji  is about 40.000  characters (Wow...), but - Thanks God -  in Japan only  2000 were used frequently.
Mmmmm.....you can imagine how hard Japanese study their own alphabets.