Man, fuck.

Now I need to learn Japanese.

Thanks guys.

quote:

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Originally posted by Shadoth:
Words like 'wa' and 'no' and so forth, indicating possession and subjectness...because we're translating from kanji, are these words just additional marks in the symbol. In other words, is anata one symbol, and anata wa the same symbol with embellishment.

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Japanese has a severely screwed up writing system because they borrowed kanji from Chinese, but it doesn't fit with their language (which has lots of varying the ending of verbs and those words "wa" "no" and so on, which are often called "particles" by the way). The general approach is to use a kanji symbol (or combination of two or more) for a given noun, verb or adjective, with the verbs and adjectives having the end of the word (the part that varies) written in hiragana at the end... most of the time. Particles are always written in hiragana, so the answer to your question (?) is that they do not modify the kanji directly, just appear as individual hiragana letters between and after kanji.

The 'wa' for 'harmony' that AC mentions is a noun, and has a kanji:

和

whereas the so-called topic marker particle 'wa', in sentences like "anata wa doko kara kimashita ka?" is a hiragana character. And, as Pauline points out, is written with the phonetic character for 'ha', just for fun.

Even more confusing, the usage of kanji is inconsistent. Words like anata are most often written in hiragana (even though kanji exist for it). In fact, the sample sentence I wrote above would most often be written without any kanji at all.

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