Introduction to Japanese Script 日本語について

There are three Japanese scripts,Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. Kanji was brought to Japan from China in ancient times, and based on Kanji the Japanese people created Hiragana and Katakana. Hiragana and Katakana is each comprised of 50 characters, and the basic number of Kanji used in Japan is between 2000 and 3000 (The total number of Japanese Kanji is about 12000).

In Japanese, texts is written both, in the vertical direction (top to downas well as from right to left, like Chinese language. Most newspapers, Magazines and books are written vertically, but today writing horizontally like English is also becoming popular. When writing, there are no spaces between characters. There is the counterpart to comma for sentence break「、」, and to period for end of sentence 「。」.