道しるべ

The Japanese language has three different alphabets:

• Kanji: Ideographic alphabet of Chinese origin. Every character represents an idea or concept.
• Hiragana: Phonetic alphabet used mostly in combination with kanji.
• Katakana: Phonetic alphabet used to represent foreign words, places, onomatopoeias, etc.

If the word is represented in kanji, the reading section shows how this word is read.

Words having multiple readings will be ordered by popularity.

Furigana

Furigana are the smaller kana characters, printed over the kanji to indicate their pronunciation. If the word has one or more kanji characters, its furigana will be written on top of them.

Transliteration and pitch accent

There is also the transliteration written in kana (hiragana or katakana) and romaji (using the Hepburn method).

The transliteration can also contain the pitch accent representation for the pronunciation of this word. In some cases, the same word may have different pitch accents, and sometimes the pitch accent depends on the part of speech of the word. If that's the case, it will be represented beside it.

Audio

Words indicated by the symbol have computer-generated audio that can be listened to by clicking on it.

Translation of the selected word to several languages.

Different meanings

A word can have one or different meanings. For each meaning, one or more equivalents of the Japanese word will be presented in English or other languages.

In the case of having multiple meanings, they will be ordered by popularity.

Tags

Some translations may have tags associated giving miscellaneous information:

• Part-of-speech information
• Information about the field of application
• Information about the source language if it's a loan word
• If the meaning is associated with a specific dialect

References

There may also be links to similar, related or antonym words.

Other languages

English is the main language for the translations, but some words will also be available in other languages: Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, or Swedish.

The quality of these translations may vary. In case of discrepancies the English translation will prevail.

There are some generic rules to write kanji properly, specifying the order on which each stroke should be written, and although there are some exceptions, these rules apply most of the time.

This section represents in a visual way the stroke order of each kanji that composes the word. The animation can be stopped, at any time and each step can be manually advanced.

Controls

Analysis of the kanji ideograms which are part of the word.

Clicking on the kanji will get you to the kanji information page, with more information about the kanji.