Question
Updated on
25 Oct 2020
- English (US)
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Japanese
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Spanish (Mexico)
Question about Japan
Why does Japanese have no spaces, and how do you read it without getting confused if it's a whole word or separate words?
Why does Japanese have no spaces, and how do you read it without getting confused if it's a whole word or separate words?
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- Country or region Japan
なぜ日本語にスペースがないのですか、それが単語全体であるか個別の単語であるかを混乱させずにどのように読むのですか？
スペースはありませんが、その代わりに句点(、)や読点(。)を用いて分かりやすくしています。
毛筆で縦書きの時代は、句読点の代わりにスペースが使われたと思います。
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- Country or region Denmark
Kanji helps a GREAT deal with reading comprehension - they make it very easy to see where one word ends and another begins.
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- Country or region United Kingdom
The Japanese writing system is split up into hiragana, katakana and kanji.
Kanji usually make up more complex words and meanings such as verbs and nouns whilst hiragana are used for particles and occasionally verbs and nouns. Katakana are mostly used for loan words.
Once you understand some basic Japanese grammar and sentence structure, it becomes easy to tell where words start and stop, even if you don’t know that particular vocabulary yet.
If an entire sentence was written in hiragana without kanji and no spaces, I believe even a native Japanese speaker would have trouble understanding the sentence.
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Deleted user
It is because written Japanese is basically derived from Chinese script (漢文), which is consisted from only kanji just as Chinese, which is also written without spaces. (Note that Japanese language itself is never derived from Chinese.)
Chinese characters are logogram, in other words letters themselves carry meaning, so it has less necessity to put space to read since they're easy to recognize each blocks of meaning.
Japanese script was later improved to use hiragana and katakana to support things which Chinese script cannot express: the verb/adjective transformation and grammar particles which Chinese doesn't have -- and in modern days, loanwords from outside kanji culture. Even for this form of writing, switching kanji and kanas in one script keeps easiness to recognize word division, and spaces have not been adopted until today.
As already mentioned, scripts only with hiragana or katakana and no spaces is hard to understand, justlikealphabetswrittenwithoutspaces. Thus when kanji cannot be used for some reason, spaces are often specially used. Old video games before 00's, which couldn't display kanji since they use too many pixels, are very good example of this. But this is for technical reason and never be a standard.
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