When written vertically, Japanese text is written from top to bottom, with multiple columns of text progressing from right to left. When written horizontally, text is almost always written left to right, with multiple rows progressing downward, as in standard English text.
Your Wikipedia knowledge is correct - vertical Japanese is top-to-bottom, right-to-left; and historically (i.e. pre-WWII), horizontal text was treated as a single row of vertical text. This meant that since you start on the right when reading vertically, you started on the right here as well.
Traditionally, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese are written vertically in columns going from top to bottom and ordered from right to left, with each new column starting to the left of the preceding one.
Back and front are often relative terms. What looks like the front of a book to you may look like the back of a book to a Japanese person. Most, but not all Japanese books read from right to left, whereas English books are read from left to right.
Modern Japanese is written in a mixture of three basic scripts: Kanji — which are Chinese ideographic symbols — as well as Hiragana and Katakana — two phonetic alphabets (syllables). There are a few thousand Kanji characters, while Hiragana and Katakana have 46 each.
When written vertically, Japanese text is written from top to bottom, with multiple columns of text progressing from right to left. When written horizontally, text is almost always written left to right, with multiple rows progressing downward, as in standard English text.
You know each character, and since Japanese is written left to right, you can just put it together like Latin letters. No need to analyze each character's strokes, just take them by their face value based on pronunciation. Ultimately how you read Japanese is the same way how you read English.
The two most well-known right to left languages are Arabic and Hebrew, which share a common linguistic ancestor in the Aramaic alphabet. Persian, Sindhi and Urdu all use adapted forms of the Arabic alphabet. Azeri, Kurdish, Azerbaijani, Rohingya, Fula, N'ko, Syriac and Maldivian are also right-to-left languages.
For example, Traditional Chinese is written in vertical columns which are read from top to bottom; the first column being on the right side of the page and the last column being on the left. In modern times, however, left-to-right horizontal Chinese has become more popular.
In a nutshell… Yes. Any language is going to take time and effort to learn, and Japanese in particular presents more challenges to a native English speaker than many other languages. However, as you've seen in this article, even the “hardest” aspects of Japanese are much simpler than they might initially seem.
Hangul is usually written from left to right and classically from right to left. It is also written vertically, from top to bottom and from right to left. This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
Traditionally, Japanese is written in a format called 縦書き tategaki, or vertical writing. In this format, the characters are written in columns going from top to bottom.
Like hiragana, Japan's third writing system, katakana, is a native alphabet based on sounds. But why did Japan have need for yet another writing system? The reason goes back, again, to the fact that reading kanji is difficult – and not just for non-Japanese people and women.
The problem was, manyougana used multiple kanji for each phonetic sound - over 900 characters for the 90 phonetic sounds in Japanese - so it was inefficient and time-consuming. Gradually, people began to simplify kanji characters into simpler characters - that's where hiragana and katakana came from.
It is said that right-to-left scripts can be indicative of how ancient the language is because of the medium of writing that was used to carve these languages in stone. In other words, the likelihood that a language is written from right to left is greater if the language came to existence before paper was invented.
The sequential flow of the writing system of a particular language (e.g. for English this is left to right; for Arabic or Hebrew it is right to left).
The simple answer is that we read from left to right because we write from left to right. And why do we write from left to right? Written English is derived from Latin (written from left to right) which was derived from Greek (also written from left to right).
Although there are just 12 languages with RTL writing scripts, LTR languages boast with larger numbers.
Right-to-left can also refer to top-to-bottom, right-to-left (TB-RL or vertical) scripts of tradition, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, though in modern times they are also commonly written left to right (with lines going from top to bottom).
Because more people were right-handed than left-handed, the process of carving the rock may have started on the right and proceeded to the left. The direction in which Arabic was written may be due to the scribe's position at the time, seated on the floor, hand held at an angle holding a reed dipped in ink.
The early Greek alphabet was written, like its Semitic forebears, from right to left. This gradually gave way to the boustrophedon style, and after 500 bce Greek was always written from left to right.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
However, many experts believe it takes between 4 to 6 months of dedicated study to reach a beginner level. On the other hand, you can expect to spend at least 3 years studying to become fluent in Japanese with near-native level accuracy.
You Can Learn Japanese to a Good Level After Just a Few Months. Chris Broad (Abroad in Japan) shows that it's possible to survive in Japanese with as little as 6 months of studying.