Furigana
Three-kana readings are not uncommon, particularly due to yōon with a long vowel, such as ryō (りょう); five kana are required for kokorozashi (志、こころざし) and six for uketamawaru (承る、うけたまわる), the longest of any character in the Joyo kanji.
These cause severe spacing problems due to length and these words being used as units (hence closely associated with the preceding figure).
The distinction between regular kana and the smaller character forms (yōon and sokuon), which are used in regular orthography to mark such things as gemination and palatalization, is often not made in furigana: for example, the usual hiragana spelling of the word 却下 (kyakka) is きゃっか, but in furigana it might be written きやつか.
Furigana are most commonly used in works for children, who may not have sufficiently advanced reading skills to recognize the kanji, but can understand the word when written phonetically in hiragana.
Numeric characters used for counting (e.g. 二本/２本 ni-hon "two long things"; ２つめ futatsume "second"; 第二巻/第２巻 dai-ni kan "book 2"; ２ページ ni-pēji "page 2"; etc.)
Exceptions include a few cases such as 一人/１人 hitori "one person" and 二人/２人 futari "two people", which may be tagged with separate kana for each character (一人/１人), or non-separated kana for the whole word (一人/１人), depending on the style of the publisher in question; or characters for numerals greater than 1,000 (千), such as 万 (10,000), 億 (100,000,000), etc.
Numeric words in established compounds (e.g. 一歩 ippo "step"; 一目 hitome "sight; attention"), however, are generally tagged with furigana.
The words are written in the original foreign script, such as hangul for Korean, and furigana is used to indicate the pronunciation.
For instance, the word "birthdate" might be glossed in furigana as バースデイト (bāsudeito), which corresponds to an imperfect pronunciation.
[8] Some authors may even use furigana that means the opposite of what the base text does to reinforce the complicated relationship between characters.
A similar technique is used in Japanese subtitles on foreign films to associate the written Japanese with the sounds actually being spoken by the actors, or in a translation of a work of fiction to preserve the original sound of a proper name in furigana while indicating its meaning with kanji.
[10] Some manga combine the rendition of a foreign word (especially an obscure one) in furigana as the intended reading of a term, with more familiar kanji as the meaning.
For example, 駅 eki "station" may be annotated with ステーション sutēshon (the rendition of the English "station") to convey a foreign, exotic feel;[11] This is sometimes done conversely, for example, by annotating an exotic term like ベーゼ bēze "kiss" with a more common synonym like キッス kissu.
[12] Some writers use furigana to represent slang pronunciations, particularly those that would be difficult to understand without the kanji to provide their meaning.
[citation needed] Okurigana are kana that appear inline at normal size following kanji stems, typically to complete and to inflect adjectives and verbs.
In this use they may also help to disambiguate kanji with multiple readings; for example, 上がる (あがる, agaru) vs. 上る (のぼる, noboru).
In the written style known as kanbun, which is the Japanese approximation of Classical Chinese, small marks called kunten are sometimes added as reading aids.
While rare now, some late 19th–early 20th century authors used kanji as furigana for loanwords written in katakana.
