Today, we’re starting a new lesson about the different Japanese writing directions. As you may know, it is possible to write Japanese language in two different directions. Up to now, we use the horizontal writing direction which we will call the Western writing direction, because it is a writing direction which was inspired by ours, the one we use in the West and which is today widely used in Japanese.
Below, I give you a very simple example :
コンビニの前でオレンジジュースを飲む。
I drink an orange juice in front of the konbini.
Note : this kanji, 前, means « in front of » or « before ». It is pronounced まえ in purely Japanese. This, 飲む, is the verb « to drink ». It is pronounced のむ.
Now, I wrote you a sentence horizontally just like westerners do. The sentence reads from left to right like English and all other Western languages. On several lines that are read from top to bottom. Until then, no problem. This is how you write in English; this is the system that we have been using since the beginning of the courses in Japanese, you are in known territory.
Then, there is a second direction of writing of Japanese which is the traditional direction of writing, the one that is basically used in Japanese, traditionally, since the invention of the Japanese writing with the adoption of the kanji…
In this form of writing, the elements are read in columns from right to left and read from top to bottom. Even the punctuation marks are placed at the bottom.
Then, maybe you have already noticed it and I do not know if I have already made a remark on this point but, in Japanese, there is no space between the words. When we write a sentence in Japanese, we write all the characters in a row pasted to each other without any spaces between the characters. And if this is already starting to worry you, my answer is that there is no problem. It is true that when we start to see sentences in Japanese on several lines, when we see whole paragraphs with all these characters, it is enough to make you dizzy. And yet, don't worry, there are ways to find your way around, especially because in Japanese, words are written with different writing systems. We have the words in kanji, we have those in hiragana, then in katakana, we have grammatical particles in hiragana and foreign words in katakana…
All these elements are very important because they allow us to clearly distinguish the words between them. That’s why Japanese is written very little exclusively in hiragana. Even if it is technically possible, it does not happen otherwise the sentences would be unreadable. To give you an example, I repeat the same sentence as at the beginning but only in hiragana :
コンビニのまえでオレンジジュースをのむ。
Well, for once, this sentence contains katakana so obviously, it is still quite simple to understand. Here a better example :
わたしはやきゅうじょうでともだちとめんをたべる。
There, things get tough. A sentence entirely in hiragana is much more complicated. I have a hard time guessing where the words are, where the verb is and the different grammatical particles. Let's put this sentence correctly :
私は野球場で友達と麺を食べる。
I eat noodles with my friends on the baseball field.
Note : if you don't know all the words that make up the sentence, it doesn't matter; for now, the important thing is that you understand the idea.
This is much better. Thanks to the presence of the kanji, I can easily read the sentence. Now you understand why the use of kanji has been maintained in the Japanese language until today.
At first, when you see long sentences in Japanese, whole paragraphs with all these kanji, these hiragana, these kana, it can seem very scary at first but by training, oral and written practice, and a lot of reading, you will end up reading whole mangas and books without blinking, be assured. It will be the same when you watch Japanese anime. At the beginning, you hear characters speaking, you don't understand a word of what they are saying... and little by little, you start to recognize a word, then another, then whole sentences, first of all very simple, and finally you understand dialogues, whole films in Japanese. Besides, when Japanese people speak in Japanese, there is no space between the words and yet you will come to understand little by little what they are saying. It’s like when someone speaks fluent English to you. There is no space between the words but you understand perfectly what this person is telling you because you have been used to it for a long time.
So far, you are only at the beginning of your Japanese language learning, much remains to be done, but continue your efforts and I can assure you that you will be surprised.
Small precision : in video games for children, the texts are sometimes entirely written in hiragana because, I remind you, children obviously do not know all the kanji. In most video games in the Japanese version, the player is given the option of displaying the text with kanji or entirely in hiragana. This is particularly the case of licenses sometimes very well known such as Pokemon. The latter is aimed both at a very young audience who knows very few or no kanji, and at an adolescent audience who already knows a few hundred kanji. And imagine that a child who is still in elementary school wants to play Pokémon but he does not know all the kanji, he will be able to select the option to display only the hiragana. And at that time, the words in hiragana and the grammatical particles, which are also in hiragana, will appear spaced from each other for easier reading.
Coming back to this second reading direction which is also the traditional reading direction in Japanese, the first one that was used, know that it is still widely used today.
We can find it especially in manga where we have very vertical bubbles adapted to traditional Japanese writing. You take any manga and you have very vertical bubbles in opposition to our western comics where the bubbles are, on the contrary very horizontal because adapted to Western writing. Besides, when it comes to translating a manga into a Western language, it is sometimes an obstacle course for translators and scantraders in order to fit whole horizontal sentences into vertical bubbles... But hey, nowadays with all the software we have, I would say that we are not doing too badly. Even today, it is very common for online text written in very vertical bubbles to appear very small because sometimes whole sentences written horizontally in very vertical bubbles have to be held. Sometimes the bubble is so vertical that it is necessary to mark a line break constantly. It doesn't always look pretty, but it’s like that.
We also find this sense of reading in Japanese newspapers, and I am talking here of the paper journal where generally more than 90% of the text is written according to the traditional Japanese reading direction while some small text areas (the captions under some photos for example) will be written horizontally. The two directions of readings therefore blend perfectly. The same goes for magazines of all kinds (video games, cosmetics, botany, gardening, etc.) and even for textbooks and artbooks. This is no problem for the Japanese, they are perfectly used to it.
It also happens that we find certain supports where everything is written entirely according to the traditional reading direction such as light novel and mangas. In manga, let's say that 99% of everything that is written is in the traditional reading direction. A manga in Japan is read starting from the right page, and we turn the pages from right to left, and you have the content of the speech bubbles which is written in columns and read from right to left and from top to below. Afterwards, you can optionally have the title on the cover page, the summary, the resume and the preface which are written horizontally. Even the names of the printer and the publisher can be written horizontally. On the other hand, on the side of manga, light novel, books and manuals in Japanese, the title will be written from top to bottom according to the traditional Japanese reading direction.
For the anecdote, the direction of reading of the first manga which arrived in the West were at the beginning adapted for the Western public. However, as in the West, we read the books starting from the left to go to the right, the publishers inverted the scanned pages of the manga to adapt everything to the direction of Western reading. So you sometimes find yourself with a character who complained of feeling sick to the heart... by putting his hand on the wrong side of the chest ! Yes, it gave rise to some not very believable quirks. Afterwards, if you were a kid as tall as three apples at the time, you may never have paid attention to it. Today, however, it is no longer a matter of reversing the pages, and Western publishers have been respecting the traditional Japanese reading direction for a few years.
Then, in the field of computers and video games, everything is written entirely in the Western reading direction. You take the cover of any video game in Japanese ; everything written on the front and back of the cover is written horizontally. Simply because everything related to computers and video games, everything that is intended to be brought to the screen, everything will be written horizontally. Even on Japanese websites everything is written according to the Western reading direction, by line with a reading direction from left to right. However, on the edge of video game boxes, the title of the game or film on DVD or Blu-ray will be written this time according to the traditional Japanese reading direction.
The Japanese language also has some unique advantages over Western languages : they use very few characters to write whole sentences or paragraphs. To illustrate this, I take the example from the beginning :
I eat noodles with my friends on the baseball field. → This sentence is 42 characters long.
Now let's see the same sentence in Japanese :
私は野球場で友達と麺を食べる。 → The same sentence in Japanese is only 14 characters long.
This characteristic specific to the Japanese language gives a big advantage on a social network like Twitter, for example, where the tweets that we can post are limited to 140 characters. You have enough space to tell the story of your life. Casually, a social network like Twitter is perfectly suited to Japanese writing although this social network was never designed specifically for Japanese people at the start.
This course is now over, thank you for reading. Continue to work well, be conscientious, hardworking and what can I say, except that I’m waiting for you at the next vocabulary course.
Good revisions to all.
Introduction