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Introduction
Modern Japanese can be written horizontally, from left to right, or vertically, from top to bottom. Japanese is one of the rare languages that uses multiple writing systems simultaneously, sometimes even in the same sentence. It is written by combining Chinese characters, called kanji, and two sets of syllabic alphabets called kana (hiragana and katakana) along with a few punctuation marks. Each kanji character represents a meaning, while each kana character represents a sound. For example, the following short sentence contains kanji, hiragana, and katakana:
パーティーに来ました。
Pātī ni kimashita.
(He) came to the party.
The non-Chinese loanword パーティー, written pātī in Roman letters and meaning party, is written in katakana. The stem of the verb 来, pronounced ki and meaning to come, is written using kanji. The grammatical particle に, written ni in Roman letters and meaning to, and the inflectional element ました, pronounced mashita (polite past affirmative), are written in hiragana. Isn’t it interesting that all three writing systems can be used in such a simple sentence?
The total number of kana is relatively small: there are only 46 basic characters for each
