Japanese writing system

The modern Japanese writing system is a combination of two character types: logographic Kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic Kana. Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: Hiragana, used for native or naturalised Japanese words and grammatical elements, and Katakana, used for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis. Almost all Japanese sentences contain a mixture of kanji and kana. Because of this mixture of scripts, in addition to a large inventory of kanji characters, the Japanese writing system is often considered to be the most complicated in use anywhere in the world.
Several thousand kanji characters are in regular use. Each has an intrinsic meaning (or range of meanings), and most have more than one pronunciation, the choice of which depends on context. The hiragana and katakana syllabaries also originally derive from Chinese characters, but have been simplified and modified to such...