1. Japan By Melanie Popescu Because Japanese write their books and papers from right to left, this presentation will give an example of how it would look like.

2. Thesis: Japan hasn’t lost sight of its very old language and writing style and still treats it as an important aspect of its culture What I have learned about Japan’s writing style and language, gave me a new perspective on its modern life. They learned how to write over centuries ago and they still haven't forgotten the importance of some words and their meanings. New words haven't been added to their old language and they still speak the same way now as they did in the past.

3. Inquiry Research In the modern language, Chinese characters are used to write the major content words with content such as verbs, nouns, and adjectives. Hiragana is used to write grammatical markers and endings. Foreign words are written in katakana. Katakana and Hiragana are used together with kanji in writing modern Japanese. Japanese now is written both from the top to the bottom, beginning at the right-hand side of the page and from left to write in a more western style for science and research books.

4. Background/ historical perspective On Japan’s Writing System Until the 400s and 500s A.D, the Japanese didn’t have a writing system. Japanese wrote words and endings with Chinese characters. They adopted the Chinese characters legally as a basic writing system for them called kanji. Unlike the Chinese writing system, they created a two syllabic alphabet system called hiragana and katakana. Hiragana and katakana now is being used in kanji instead of the Chinese characters.

5. Ethnography What do you know about Japan? If you ever visited Japan, what would you do there? “I would want to go out to a fancy Japanese restaurant and see what type of food they eat.” -My Mom “Not a lot, but I do know that they write with ink and a brush in school.” -My Mom

6. Japan One of Japan’s many beautiful cherry blossom gardens. “Japan is a nation of East Asia. It is composed of four large islands and many smaller ones, which extend in a narrow arc, northeast to southwest, for a distance of about 1,500 miles off the eastern coast of Asia. The four main islands are Honshu, the largest and most populous, Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Shikoku.” -Albert M. Craig

7. An Interesting and Fun Fact About Japan Japanese writing is used to make a genre of books that are popular all over the world to this day; manga. Manga is Japanese comics that are made in japan and are very different from American comics. Unlike American comics, Japanese comics target the eye of adults and teenagers, not children. Manga can be written in Japanese by using all three writing systems; hiragana, katakana and kanji.

8. What I would research more about Japan… If I had the time to research another topic on Japan that wasn’t its language and writing system, it would be its etiquette. The Japanese have very different etiquette then what we are used to and I thought it would be interesting what they would call a stranger or what they would do at a dinner table.