ABSTRACT
Kanji and Kana are two distinct and parallel systems of letters that have been used in the Japanese language for more than 1,200 years (Iwata, Sugishita, & Toyokura, 1982; Iwata 1984). Kanji letters were imported from China around the 6th century. Because Kanji letters correspond to morphemes of the spoken Japanese language, each individual Kanji letter has several phonetic as well as semantic values. However, when more than two Kanji letters are combined to represent a single word, the phonetic value of each Kanji letter becomes strictly fixed and the entire string of letters should be read in a particular way. As Kanji letters have both semantic and phonetic values when they are used to represent words, they are different from true ideograms that have only meaning without definite phonetic value. Consequently, Kanji letters should be considered as morphograms. Nowadays, most of the nouns, roots of the verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are usually written in Kanji.
