Korean also uses ideographs based on the set invented in China, called Hanja. About 3,000 Hangul characters from the entire Hangul characters are usually used in Korean computer systems. Hangul has more than 11,000 characters, which consist of 19 consonants, 21 vowels, and an optional 27 consonants. Korean text can be written using a phonetic writing system called Hangul. Arabic numerals and Roman letters are also present in Japanese text.Īlthough it is possible to completely avoid the use of Kanji, most Japanese readers find text containing Kanji easier to understand. On average 55% of Japanese text is Hiragana, 35% Kanji, and 10% Katakana. In addition, there are about 170 Hiragana and Katakana characters. Nonetheless, computer systems must support more thanħ000 because that is what the Japan Industry Standard (JIS) requires. Now only about 3500 are frequently used, although the average Japanese writer has a vocabulary of about 2000 Kanji characters. Kanji has tens of thousands of characters, but the number commonly used has been declining steadily over the years.
Katakana is mostly used to represent "foreign" words-words "imported" Kanji characters are used to write root words. Japanese text is composed of three different scripts mixed together: Kanji ideographs derived from Chinese, and two phonetic scripts (or syllabaries), Hiragana and Katakana.Īlthough each character in Hiragana has an equivalent in Katakana, Hiragana is the most common script, with cursive rather than block-like letter forms. The alphabets of most western European countries are similar to the standard 26-character alphabet used in English-speaking countries, but there are often some additional basic characters, some marked (or accented) characters, and some ligatures. Japanese, for example, can contain over 40,000 characters, Chinese even more. While the English alphabet contains only 26 characters, some languages contain many more characters. For example, in Thai, the Thai dictionary defines sorting through the sequences of characters that have different weights. In some languages, characters have weight toĭetermine the priority of the character sequences. For example, the character "ö" sorts with the ordinary "o" in Germany, but sorts separately in Sweden, where it is the last letter of the alphabet. Sorting order for particular characters is not the same in all languages. In languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Thai, however, there is often no delimiter between words. In English, words are separated by a space character. Language Word and Letter Differences Word Delimiters