Contents:

Japanese writing can be considered a series of equal sized blocks, each block containing one phonetic kana or a kanji; punctuation marks were not used before modern times, the structure of sentences in classical writing was inferred from their context. Most punctuation marks in modern Japanese have similar functions to their English counterparts; however, they look a little different and have somewhat different conventions. These are some common Japanese punctuation marks, please click on the directory below for other marks which are now established.

。 
This maru (‘small circle’) marks a full stop. In vertical text it tends to be in the upper right of the gap space.

、 
Ideographic comma, which follows the same rule as the maru (full stop) in vertical text. Notice how it goes down from left to right, unlike a Western comma. It is good practice to put a comma (or space) after the particle は ’wa’ to help one avoid confusing it with identical hiragana は ‘ha’. 

・
The nakaten (‘middle dot’) is used to separate items in lists. Japanese doesn't use spaces to donate words, so this may sometimes be used to show the beginning and end of foreign words in katakana
e.g. クリーム・ソーダ  kuriimu sooda (cream soda)

〜 
Wave dash’s ‘nami’ (as in tsu-nami) are special forms of dashes used in ‘from to’ constructions  e.g. 9〜5

Japanese language learning
(No pop-ups so please right-click pic and ‘open in new tab/window’ if you wish to stay in this site)

Up
Last Next