<P> Modern Japanese also uses another writing format, called yokogaki (横書き). This writing format is horizontal and reads from left to right, as in English . </P> <P> A book printed in tategaki opens with the spine of the book to the right, while a book printed in yokogaki opens with the spine to the left . </P> <P> Japanese is normally written without spaces between words, and text is allowed to wrap from one line to the next without regard for word boundaries . This convention was originally modelled on Chinese writing, where spacing is superfluous because each character is essentially a word in itself (albeit compounds are common). However, in kana and mixed kana / kanji text, readers of Japanese must work out where word divisions lie based on an understanding of what makes sense . For example, あなた は お母さん に そっくり ね must be mentally divided as あなた は お母さん に そっくり ね (Anata wa okaasan ni sokkuri ne, "You're just like your mother"). In romaji, it may sometimes be ambiguous whether an item should be transliterated as two words or one . For example, 愛する, "to love", composed of 愛 (ai, "love") and する (suru, "to do", here a verb - forming suffix), is variously transliterated as aisuru or ai suru . </P> <P> Words in potentially unfamiliar foreign compounds, normally transliterated in katakana, may be separated by a punctuation mark called a nakaguro (中 黒, "middle dot") to aid Japanese readers . For example, ビル ・ ゲイツ (Bill Gates). This punctuation is also occasionally used to separate native Japanese words, especially in concatenations of kanji characters where there might otherwise be confusion or ambiguity about interpretation, and especially for the full names of people . </P>

What form of japanese writing is most common