Furigana in a sentence

Examples Here is an example of Japanese ruby characters (called furigana ) for Tokyo (" 東京 main"): Most furigana (Japanese ruby characters) are written with the hiragana syllabary, but katakana and romaji are also occasionally used.

According to Ministry of Education guidelines, and the opinions of educators, the use of Japanese furigana should be avoided in English teaching due to the differences in pronunciation between English and Japanese.

Also, because the kanji represent meaning while the furigana represent sound, one can combine the two to create puns or indicate meanings of foreign words.

Another use is to write the kanji for something which had been previously referenced, but write furigana for sore ( それ main) or are ( あれ main), meaning "that".

Furigana are also often used in foreign language textbooks for Japanese learners to indicate pronunciation.

Furigana is used most widely in children's or learners' books.

Furigana may also be used for foreign names written in kanji.

Hiragana can also be written in a superscript called furigana above or beside a kanji to show the proper reading.

In case an isolated kanji character has a long reading—for example 〜に携わる main (where 携 main reads たずさ main, tazusa)—the furigana may instead spill over into the space next to the neighboring kana characters, without condensing or changing spacing.

Nevertheless, some cases are ambiguous and require a furigana gloss, which are also used simply for difficult readings or to specify a non-standard reading.

The most common form of ruby is called furigana or yomigana and is found in Japanese instructional books, newspapers, comics and books for children.

The song lyrics are often written in kanji pronounced quite differently from the furigana.

Unlike furigana, which indicate pronunciation, kunten indicate Japanese grammatical structures absent from the kanbun, as well as showing how words should be reordered to fit Japanese sentence structure.

While rare now, some late 19th–early 20th century authors used kanji as furigana for loanwords written in katakana.

Works of fiction sometimes use furigana to create new "words" by giving normal kanji non-standard readings, or to attach a foreign word rendered in katakana as the reading for a kanji or kanji compound of the same or similar meaning.