What do ー, 「, and 」 mean?


I’m a bit new to Japanese and I’m a little confused about what they are used
for.




The latter are quotation marks, equivalent to " " in English. For example, the
sentence:

> Mr Tanaka said "Good morning".

could be written as something like:

> たなかさんは「おはよう」といいました。

The former may be a little different in different contexts, but one way it's
used is to lengthen vowels when you write words in katakana. So, for example,
the word for Australia, "Oosutoraria", is written as

> オーストラリア

Note that when you write text vertically (as is traditional in Japanese), the
vowel lengthening symbol is also written vertically (｜).

You can find more about these symbols in the Wikipedia articles on [Japanese
punctuation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_punctuation) and the [List
of Japanese typographic
symbols](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_typographic_symbols).

