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Japanese: Japanese Kanji
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The complexity of Japanese symbols meanings cannot be stressed enough. Japanese Kanji characters, for example, do not translate directly to English words and very rarely will you be able to define a Japanese Kanji symbol with just one English word.
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Japanese has an extremely complicated writing system, consisting of two sets of phonetic syllabaries called the hiragana and katakana. Both the hiragana and katakana syllabaries have approximately 50 syllables. Plus, there are thousands of Chinese-derived characters called kanji, approximately 2,000 of which the Ministry of Education has designated as required learning before high school graduation. The adaptation of Chinese characters during the 6th to 9th centuries A.D. was the most important event in the development of the language. By the 12th century, the syllabic writing systems, hiragana and katakana, were created out of kanji, providing the Japanese new freedom in writing their native language. Today, the written Japanese language is written with a mixture of the three: kanji, hiragana, and katakana.
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Japanese is spoken primarily by the 126,000,000 people living on the Japanese islands. It is believed to have developed in isolation and is not known to be related to any other family of languages. Japanese has 4 individual writing systems: romanji, katakana, hiragana, and kanji. Despite the considerable level of complexity of the Japanese language, Japan boasts one of the world's highest literacy rates. For foreigners, Japanese has proven relatively easy to pronounce as there are only 5 vowels and 17 consonants (compared to 15 and 22 in English, respectively). Unlike most western languages, Japanese has an extensive system for the expression of politeness and formality.
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: A good Japanese Kanji dictionary will list about 9635 different Kanji. Not all of these are used regularly in Japan (some not at all) but there are still 1945 Jouyou Kanji (regularly used) and that is too many to list with all of their readings and meanings. Some characters have as many as 12 different readings depend on how it is used in a sentence. A list of Jouyou Kanji (without their readings and meanings) can be found here. Another site, can be found here - all of the readings and meanings can be listed but make for a lot of reading!
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Japanese Symbols, otherwise known as Kanji symbols or characters, originated in China thousands of years ago. Although the Japanese language has fewer sounds than most other languages, it does have an extremely complex system of writing.
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In the Meiji era, the Japanese ... coined many neologisms using Chinese roots and morphology to translate Western concepts. The Chinese and Koreans imported many of these pseudo-Chinese words into Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese via their kanji characters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For example,
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Japanese Kanji