How can you tell where the spaces are between words in Japanese?

Question

It all looks like one big jumble of letters. I can't tell where the spaces are. This is troubling because even if I convert all the letters into Romaji, I still can't tell where to separate the letters into words.

I took some random Japanese from a Japanese website and copied it and pasted it here:

｣は権利者の皆様の権利保護のため、事前登録制による権利侵害申立のシステムを用...

Of course, I could just use an online translator to find out what it means. But I don't care about that, I need to know how to distinguish words from another. Please help.

Answer 1

no space in Japanese(not Romaji). you have to distinguish each words by yourself.

Answer 2

Japanese doesn't use spaces like English. If this sentence were in Japanese, then it would like like this: thisishowjapanesewritesentencesandma

ybeitconfusesyoubutifyouknowthelanguag

ethenyoucanpickoutthewords.



(Notice I did a line break within the word, no hyphen, just like in Japanese.)



They have commas, periods, and quotation marks (looks different than ours). Traditionally no question marks or exclamation points but a lot of people use it these days. Foreign words may be separated by a dot floating in the middle.



I'm guessing you just started learning Japanese? If that's the case, you can guess at what's a word by taking chunks of kanji and throwing it in the dictionary. Probably 2 kanji together is one word but not always. Could be 3 or 4 sometimes. Particles, learn them and you can figure out where some of the words are. Another tool is a web browser within a web browser. If you go to this site and view web pages with it, then you can put your mouse over kanji and it will give you the reading and translation, which is really useful!

http://www.rikai.com/



But first I suggest you learn more basic stuff, perhaps sentences with little to no kanji in them.

Answer 3

There are no spaces in Japanese. To translate into romaji you just need to know where the particles are.



wa kenrisha no minasama no kenri hogo no tame, jizen yourokusei ni yoru senri singaisaru...



Since you're just learning Japanese I would suggest NOT using a random Japanese page that will be using huge sentence structures you cannot yet grasp. Stick to the basics, keep it simple, and all that jazz.

Here are some good starters:

私の名前はベンです。

猫と犬が好きです。

毎日、すき焼きを食べます。

本をぜんぜん読みません。

But, ultimately, how to translate into romaji is all up to you. Japanese typically write using spaces in one of two ways when writing books for kids:

私の 名前は ベンです。

or

私 の 名前 は ベン です。

Answer 4

All I see is lots of squares where japanese letters should be.