Japanese

Japanese may have the most complicated writing system of any language spoken today. It's written in a combination of three complete scripts, sometimes supplemented with Latin letters and various other marks.[12]

[12] My sources for the section on Japanese are Janet Shibamoto Smith, “Japanese Writing,” in The World's Writing Systems, pp. 209–217; Lunde, pp. 42–47; and Nakanishi, pp. 94–95.

The history of written Japanese dates back to the third century, when the Han characters were first used to write Japanese (in Japanese, the Han characters are called kanji). Japanese isn't linguistically related to Chinese (although it contains a lot of words borrowed from Chinese), so the Han characters never worked as well for Japanese. Most of the ...

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