Related Research Articles
Kanji are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese script, and used in the writing of Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequently-derived syllabic scripts of hiragana and katakana. The characters have Japanese pronunciations; most have two, with one based on the Chinese sound. A few characters were invented in Japan by constructing character components derived from other Chinese characters. After World War II, Japan made its own efforts to simplify the characters, now known as shinjitai, by a process similar to China's simplification efforts, with the intention to increase literacy among the common folk. Since the 1920s, the Japanese government has published character lists periodically to help direct the education of its citizenry through the myriad Chinese characters that exist. There are nearly 3,000 kanji used in Japanese names and in common communication.
Chinese characters are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. Chinese characters are the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world. By virtue of their widespread current use throughout East Asia and Southeast Asia, as well as their profound historic use throughout the Sinosphere, Chinese characters are among the most widely adopted writing systems in the world by number of users.
Monash University is a public research university based in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Named after prominent World War I general Sir John Monash, it was founded in 1958 and is the second oldest university in the state. The university has a number of campuses, four of which are in Victoria, and one in Malaysia. Monash also has a research and teaching centre in Prato, Italy, a graduate research school in Mumbai, India and graduate schools in Suzhou, China and Tangerang, Indonesia. Monash University courses are also delivered at other locations, including South Africa.
Japanese names in modern times consist of a family name (surname) followed by a given name. Nevertheless, when a Japanese name is written in the Roman alphabet, ever since the Meiji era, the official policy has been to reverse the order. As of 2019, the government has stated its intention to change this policy. Japanese names are usually written in kanji. The pronunciation of Japanese kanji in names follows a special set of rules, though parents are able to choose pronunciations; many foreigners find it difficult to read kanji names because of parents being able to choose which pronunciations they want for certain kanji, though most pronunciations chosen are common when used in names. Some kanji are banned for use in names, such as the kanji for "weak" and "failure", amongst others.
The culture of Japan has changed greatly over the millennia, from the country's prehistoric Jōmon period, to its contemporary modern culture, which absorbs influences from Asia and other regions of the world.
In the Japanese writing system, hentaigana are variant forms of hiragana.
Hanetsuki is a Japanese traditional game, similar to racket games like badminton but without a net, played with a rectangular wooden paddle called a hagoita and a brightly coloured shuttlecock, called a hane. Often played by girls at the New Year, the game can be played by any gender in two fashions: by one person attempting to keep the shuttlecock aloft as long as possible, or by two people batting it back and forth. Players who fail to hit the shuttlecock get marked on the face with India Ink. Traditionally, the longer the shuttlecock remains in the air, the greater protection from mosquitoes the players will receive during the coming year. Although hanetsuki is not as popular as it used to be, decorative hagoita are commonly sold throughout Japan.
Tokuhime (徳姫), also known as Gotokuhime (五徳姫) or Lady Toku was a Japanese noble lady from the Sengoku period. She was a daughter of daimyō Oda Nobunaga and later married Matsudaira Nobuyasu, the first son of Tokugawa Ieyasu. She is remembered as the person most responsible for the deaths of Nobuyasu and his mother, Ieyasu's wife, the Lady Tsukiyama.
The Nihon kokugo daijiten (日本国語大辞典), often abbreviated as the Nikkoku (日国) and sometimes known in English as Shogakukan's Japanese Dictionary, is the largest Japanese language dictionary published. In the period from 1972 to 1976, Shogakukan published the 20-volume first edition. The 14-volume second edition was published in the period from November 2000 to December 2001. It includes substantial additions to and improvements over the first edition.
Japanese dictionaries have a history that began over 1300 years ago when Japanese Buddhist priests, who wanted to understand Chinese sutras, adapted Chinese character dictionaries. Present-day Japanese lexicographers are exploring computerized editing and electronic dictionaries. According to Nakao Keisuke (中尾啓介):
It has often been said that dictionary publishing in Japan is active and prosperous, that Japanese people are well provided for with reference tools, and that lexicography here, in practice as well as in research, has produced a number of valuable reference books together with voluminous academic studies. (1998:35)
WWWJDIC is an online Japanese dictionary based on the electronic dictionaries compiled and collected by Australian academic Jim Breen. The main Japanese–English dictionary file (EDICT) contains over 180,000 entries, and the ENAMDICT dictionary contains over 720,000 Japanese surnames, first names, place names and product names. WWWJDIC also contains several specialized dictionaries covering topics such as life sciences, law, computing, engineering, etc.
JWPce is a simple Japanese-language text editor that runs on the Windows 95, ME, 2000, XP, NT, and CE platforms. It is designed for non-native speakers of Japanese who want to produce Japanese-language documents. Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, JWPce is free software.
JIS X 0212 is a Japanese Industrial Standard defining a coded character set for encoding supplementary characters for use in Japanese. This standard is intended to supplement JIS X 0208. It is numbered 953 or 5049 as an IBM code page.
Shigenobu is a Japanese name. It is usually a male given name but can be a surname or the name of a place. As with most personal names, the meaning of the name is derived from which kanji are used, and there are several different kanji that are pronounced "shige" and a few which can be pronounced "nobu."
Mizui is a Japanese surname and toponym. Its meaning differs depending on the kanji used to write it.
Tatoeba is a free collection of example sentences with translations geared towards foreign language learners. It is available in more than 400 languages. Its name comes from the Japanese phrase "tatoeba" (例えば), meaning "for example". It is written and maintained by a community of volunteers through a model of open collaboration. Individual contributors are known as Tatoebans. It is run by Association Tatoeba, a French non-profit organization funded through donations.
JMdict is a large machine-readable multilingual Japanese dictionary. As of March 2023, it contains Japanese–English translations for around 199,000 entries, representing 282,000 unique headword-reading combinations. The dictionary files are free to use with attribution and have been widely adopted on the Internet and are used in many computer and smartphone applications. The project is considered a standard Japanese–English reference on the Internet and is used by the Unihan Database and several other Japanese–English projects.
Akiho is a Japanese given name and surname. According to WWWJDIC, there are more than a hundred different ways this name might be written in kanji.
The CJK Dictionary Institute, Inc. (CJKI) is a Japan-based dictionary compilation company headed by Jack Halpern. It specializes in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic lexicography, as well as the compilation and maintenance of large-scale lexical databases.
Gavan Breen, OAM, also known as J.G. Breen, is an Australian linguist, specialising in the description of Australian Aboriginal languages. He has studied and recorded 49 such languages.
References
- 1 2 3 4 Alexander Jacoby (21 November 2006). "Net resources make light work of Japanese study". The Japan Times . Retrieved 2 February 2008.
- ↑ Mary Sisk Noguchi (30 August 2002). "KANJI CLINIC: Cyberspace – the final frontier of kanji-learning". The Japan Times .
- ↑ Morales, Daniel (25 June 2018). "At 180,000 entries, Jim Breen's freeware Japanese dictionary is still growing". The Japan Times. Retrieved 22 January 2021.
- ↑ "Welcome to the Japanese Studies Centre". Monash Asia Institute, Monash University. 7 December 2012. Retrieved 5 December 2014.
