Before starting the customisation for Japanese, I would like to give you some background knowledge about this language. If you are familiar with the Japanese writing system, you can skip this page.
My mother tongue is Japanese. This language has a long history (the first written Japanese text appeared more than a thousand years ago), and current Japanese is spoken by more than 10^8 people. This number is about 1/3 of English speakers (including American speakers) and much more than French speakers. The Japanese grammar is not difficult and its pronunciation system is fairly simple.
But, its writing system is very complicated. We can count at least four different character sets used together in daily life.
Hiragana : the most basic character set. Each
hiragana represents a basic pronunciation unit (i.e., a syllable) in
Japanese. There are about 50 hiraganas. Although kanji (see below)
is extensively used to write ordinary Japanese text, any Japanese word
can be written in hiragana, too. Actually children start writing
everything in hiragana, then learn kanji one by one.
Example:
Katakana : this character set has one-to-one
correspondence to hiragana (see above). Mostly used for foreign words and
onomatopoeia.
Example:
Kanji : Also known as Han ideographic
characters or CJK characters. Extensively used for nouns, verb stems,
etc. If you are planning to spend a few years in Japan, I recommend
you to learn at least one thousand kanjis.
Examples:
Latin Alphabet : Widely used in technical texts
and magazines as well as in personal communications to represent
foreign words. For example "UNIX" or "BMW" are almost always spelt in
Latin alphabet, even in Japanese text. It should be noted that the
most widely used Japanese character set, i.e. JISX 0208, contains all
ASCII characters.
Examples:
In addition to the above four character sets, there are Japanese punctuation marks, too.