Kanji are usually used for entire words, sometimes you'll have two kanji for two words, or a combination for one long word, next to eachother, but if you have to change the ending of the word, like to change tense or politeness, you use hiragana as well. Which right now is not many, but I can recognize what the hiragana and katakana spell out, at least.Ī helpful hint to be able to tell where words end is to always remember that hiragana are always used for particles! This is the big tip. I know hiragana, katakana and only a few kanji, so I can't read japanese sentences with kanji in them unless they are ones I know. I think the person is more confused because you kind of have to guess with Japanese, unless you are completely fluent and know every kanji and every word combination possible. Or you can give some examples to show your problem.Ĭomments for How can you tell when words end and begin in a Japanese sentence? I hope I have not confused you further in my explanation. While kanji are more complicated as compared to hiragana and katakana, the theory is the same behind how Japanese words are formed. For example this kanji 飲 (no) is made up of 2 kanji 食 and 欠. The only problem I can guess is that you may be confused about kanji, because a kanji can be formed with few kanji. If you understand how Japanese words are formed (as explained above), you shouldn't have any problem with that. I am not very sure why you cannot tell when words end and begin in a sentence consisting of Japanese characters. You can then see how different combinations of Japanese words are formed. You may also want to refer to this page where there are many Japanese words and vocabulary available.
You can go to the following pages to find out more on each character. In order to know how Japanese words are formed, you need to have a basic understanding of the above 3 Japanese characters. For example, this Japanese word レストラン (resutoran) came from the English word "restaurant". Japanese words can also be formed with katakana, which are mainly used to express foreign words, foreign places, foreign countries,įoreign names, things "loaned" from foreign languages.
However, this will make the sentence difficult to read because many kanji are pronounced with not only one but few hiragana characters. So you can also use のむ (nomu) to represent "to drink".Īs such, it's possible to write the whole sentence consisting of only hiragana characters. On the other hand, the kanji 飲 (no) can also be represented by the hiragana character の (no), which is the pronunciation of the kanji 飲 in hiragana.
For example, this Japanese word 飲む (nomu), which mean "to drink", is made up of a kanji 飲 (no) and a hiragana character む (mu). Hi, there are mainly 3 types of characters in Japanese, hiragana, katakana and kanji, excluding romaji which is the roman characters used to help foreigners for pronunciation.Ī Japanese word can be made up of hiragana, katakana, kanji, or a combination of kanji and hiragana. I've tried finding solutions that can help but haven't been successful. Usually I can't tell if the character I'm reading is at the beginning, middle or end of a word.