As an example of how the grammatical endings are used we can take the verb “to eat” which is食べる (taberu). Here the main part of the word “eat” (pronounced “ta” in this case) is the kanji 食. The other two syllables: “be-ru” are in hiragana (べる). To say “I ate” or “you ate” etc. you would say “tabemashita”, written食べました (“be-ma-shi-ta” is written in hiragana).
The main hiragana characters are shown in this table.
Notice that the sound “hu” is unknown in Japanese, so ふ is pronounced “fu” with an “f” which is blown lightly, like someone blowing out a candle.
To write the voiced sounds for “g”, “d”, “z” and “b” two little lines called a dakuten (゛) are added after a character starting with the unvoiced sounds “k”, “t”, “s” and “h”. A circle, (゜), is added after a “h” for the sound “p”. For example: は gives the sound “ha”; ば gives the sound “ba”; ぱ gives the sound “pa”.
Sometimes when words are joined together to make compound words, the first sound of the second part changes from unvoiced to voiced. For example: “hana”: はな (nose) + ち“chi” (blood) becomes はなぢ “hanaji” (nosebleed)
Some Japanese syllables which have sliding sounds add a small version of the hiragana for "ya", "yu" or "yo" (ゃ, ゅ and ょ) This is called “yōon”. For example: “sha” sounds like “shi”+”ya” so “densha” (a tram) is written でんしゃ. A small “tsu” っ called a “sokuon” shows a doubled consonant: “Nippon” (Japan) is written にっぽん. Without the small “tsu” the first syllable would sound like the word “knee”.
A student starting to learn to write Japanese can start with hiragana or with katakana. Hiragana is the basis of learning Japanese script. However, for someone who is about to visit Japan and just wants to be able to recognize a few words, katakana will be more useful as it will help to read many of the road signs, shop names and the names of things on restaurant menus.
Kuomintang
Kuomintang (KMT; ; English: Chinese Nationalist Party) is the main political party in Republic of China (Taiwan). It was ruling in Mainland China until 1949 when Communists captured the mainland and the KMT moved to Taiwan. It was founded by Song Jiaoren and Sun Yat-sen. Chiang Kai-shek later led for decades.
Chiang Kai-shek
Chiang Kai-shek was a Chinese nationalist politician and military leader who was President of the Republic of China, born in Xikou on October 31, 1887. His father was a merchant who died when Chiang was eight years old. Chiang became an officer in the army of the Manchu empire, but supported the Chinese Xinhai Revolution of 1911 that converted China into a republic.
He led the Republic of China from 1930 to 1949 on mainland China until he was overthrown by Mao Zedong in the Chinese Civil War. He fled to Taiwan where he ruled from 1950 until his death in 1975, although his government was still officially called the Republic of China.
After his father died, Chiang joined the army. At first, he went to Baoding in northern China to study military science. Later, he went to Japan to learn more about the military. On October 10, 1911, Chiang Kai-Shek came back to China.
In 1918, he joined the Nationalist Party of Sun Yat-sen. Sun Yat-sen helped Jiang Kai-Shek make a military academic school called Huangpu Military School. In 1926 and 1927 he led the Northern Expedition to conquer local warlords and unify China. After Sun Yat-sen died, he pushed out the Communists in 1927. In 1928, he made a new government in Nanjing, and became head of the state. He focused on fighting the Communists and the Empire of Japan. In 1937, Japan began to invade China, and Chiang was in charge of the Nationalist Chinese Army, until the war ended in 1945. Chiang ruled China until 1949, when Mao Zedong, who led the Communist Party of China, attacked Chiang and his officials, and they were forced to flee to Taiwan.
Dark matter
Dark matter is a type of matter thought to be responsible for much of the mass in the universe.
The idea arose when astronomers found that the mass of large astronomical objects, and their gravitational effects, was much greater than the mass from the "luminous matter" that contains stars, gas, and dust.
Dark matter was first proposed by Jan Oort in 1932 as a reason for the spinning speeds of stars in the Milky Way. Fritz Zwicky in 1933 used dark matter to explain "missing mass" in the spinning speeds of galaxies in clusters. Later, many other observations have suggested that there is dark matter in the universe. The spinning speeds of galaxies, gravitational lensing of background objects, the temperature distribution of hot gas in galaxies and clusters of galaxies: these are some of the examples that make scientists believe in dark matter.
According to the Planck mission team, and based on the standard model of cosmology, the total mass–energy of the known universe contains 4.9% ordinary matter, 26.8% dark matter and 68.3% dark energy . Thus, dark matter is estimated to make up 84.5% of the total matter in the universe, while dark energy plus dark matter make up 95.1% of the total "stuff" in the universe.
Because dark matter does not seem to give off or reflect light, x-rays, or any other radiation, the instruments that are used to find normal matter (like hot gas, stars, planets, and us) can't find dark matter. It seems that dark matter is not made of the same thing as the matter we see every day on Earth. The only way we can tell if dark matter is there, is by how it affects things we can "see" by gravity.
In 2006, a group of scientists claimed that they had found a way to find dark matter. Since dark matter is supposedly very different from normal matter, it is expected to act differently. The scientists observed two far-away galaxy clusters that had crashed into each other at high speed: normal matter would have been scattered nearby after the collision, while dark matter would not. By measuring gravity, they were able to detect what looked like two clouds of dark matter, with a cloud of normal matter (hot gas) in between them.
Katakana
Katakana is a Japanese script used for writing words borrowed from other languages. It is easier to read than the kanji (the picture method based on Chinese characters). Once the 46 katakana symbols have been learned, the reader knows how to pronounce them.
Katakana and hiragana are both syllabaries. In English we use the letters of the alphabet. In most words each letter stands for a bit of sound (a phoneme). In a syllabary each symbol stands for a syllable. For example: in English we write “Wagamama”: each of the eight letters standing for a sound: “W-a-g-a-m-a-m-a”. But if the word “Wagamama” is divided into syllables there are four syllables (blocks of sound): Wa-ga-ma-ma. In Katakana it is written with four symbols: ワガママ.
Hiragana works in the same way, but the symbols are mostly different. Katakana is perhaps a little easier to learn than Hiragana because the symbols are simpler and more “squared off”. Together Katakana and Hiragana are called “Kana”.
This is a table of the basic katakana strokes. The first chart shows the basic katakana (characters with red letters next to them are no longer used today).
From the first table it can be seen that there are 46 basic characters (top left, first five columns, from "a" to "wa"). Diphthongs (vowels that slide from one sound to the other) have to be written with an extra symbol in small print. For example: the sound “mu” in our word “music” sounds like “myu” so it is written ミュ (mi+yu). So the word “musical” (as in a stage musical) is written: ミュージカル.
A long vowel is shown in katakana by a kind of dash called a “choon” (ー).
Katakana is used to write words which have been borrowed from other languages, or to write foreign names and names of countries. For example, America is written アメリカ.