ELI5, The Japanese Writing System
In: 0
Many years ago the Japanese discovered their rivals the Chinese had a writing system. So they ‘borrowed’ it and made it their own. They call it ‘kanji’ and these characters make up the bulk of the written word in Japanese
But the phonetics of Chinese and Japanese are not quite the same. So to fill in the gaps, they created a new system representing all the sounds in Japanese (ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, etc). They call this ‘hiragana’.
Years after that, Western Culture arrived and introduced new words to the Japanese language. To differentiate these new words, a new writing system with the same phonetics as hiragana was created, and all ‘western’ words are written using it. They call this ‘katakana’
Latest Answers