I’m considering a trip to Japan in the future and I love langauge learning so I started casually looking at learning a little bit of Japanese and I was seeing reference to 3 different alphabets: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. I read a little bit about them but I’m still somewhat confused on the differences between them and how/when are each used? And if I’m casually learning for future travel, is one better to learn?
In: Other
Katakana: everything not Japanese. Non Japanese words, city names, people’s names.
Hiragana: some Japanese words, and parts of the words. Also grammar. Particles, endings, tenses.
Kanji: most of the words. Usually it’s 1-3 kanji per word.
Example: ケーキを食べたい
Katakana ケーキ – cake (keeki)
Hiragana: を – particle, べたい – part of the word, and grammar
Kanji: 食 – eat. But the whole word is 食べる, so it’s kanji and hiragana.
Hiragana is mostly used for particles, like *wo*, *ka* etc. It can also be used to write down words, but for strictly phonetical writing Katakana is used. Katakana is also used to write down borrowed words, for example パソーコーン (‘pasokon’) is in katakana, because it’s from “personal computer” Paso – kon. Both of these operate on syllables.
As for Kanji, each one encompasses a word / idea, for example, there’s kanji for tree 木, a kanji for groove **林** and a forest **森**, as you can see groove is basically 2 trees, and forest is 3 trees, so it sometimes makes sense, but there are just as many examples of it not making sense. There are combos of kanji that have nothing to do with the meaning of the final word, and there are some combos that make sense, but mostly kanji written words are separated with particles, katakana or hiragana.
Hiragana and katakana are both “kana” systems, and each character represents one “mora”, or phonographical unit, of the Japanese language. Kanji is a logographic script, where the individual characters basically represent whole words.
Most Japanese writing consists of kanji. Hiragana is affixed to kanji to modify the meaning of the character or to write words that do not have a kanji. Katakana is used like we use italics, for loan words, technical words, and names.
Hiragana and katakana are “syllabaries” — like an alphabet, but syllables instead of letters. For example: KA – KE – KI – KU – KO are 5 of the syllables in Japanese. These are used to “spell out” words which can also be written in kanji, which is a picture that means a word.
For example, books or graphic novels which may have a younger or foreign audience, who are not expected to know as many kanji, may have the syllables written in below more complicated kanji so the word can be sounded out and understood.
As for when you would use each syllabary: hiragana is used for native Japanese words, and katakana is used for foreign words adopted into the language (“loan words”). Loan words are often (but not always!) English, so if you know katakana you can often figure out katakana words by sounding out the syllables:
KO – N – PYUU – TA
Oh! That’s “computer”!
Katakana is phonetic and most quickly useful because you don’t have to learn and Japanese to use it. That’s because katakana is used for foreign words including words that have been borrowed from English.
Hiragana is also phonetic but is used for Japanese words.
Kanji is nit phonetic but instead uses more complex characters to represent meanings. The most useful reason for knowing some Kanji, even if you don’t speak Japanese, is that Kanji is so frequently used for names. Not only that but Japanese tend to use a fairly small subset of the characters for names. For example Tokyo and Kyoto have the same character for “kyo” and it means “capital”. Nakayama and Tanaka both have “naka” meaning “center”. Nakayama and Yamada both have “yama” meaning mountain. Tanaka and Yamada both include “field” pronounced “ta” or “da”.
Kanji is also used for words that aren’t names, frequently as a “root word” in combination with hiragana where the hiragana handles things like conjugation. When Kanji is used this way it can have multiple pronunciations that don’t seem related. It gets complicated.
Hiragana is sort of the baseline writing system. It’s the first one you get taught, and you can write any sentence in Japanese in Hiragana. It’s phonetic, so each symbol represents a sound. わたし means “watashi” or ”I”, and the three characters are wa-ta-shi
Katakana is another phonetic system. It’s mostly used for foreign words, and sometimes for emphasis. So a word like hamburger is written ハンバーガー or hanbaagaa.
Kanji are the characters borrowed from Chinese. Rather than writing several hiragana characters for a word, you can write some words in Kanji. So わたし or I can also be written 私. So that’s shorter, and the other nice thing about Kanji is that since Japanese doesn’t use spaces, a long string of hiragana can be hard to break up into individual words, so Kanji makes that easier.
So a sentence that uses all three writing systems is
私はハンバーガーを食べます。
This means “I eat hamburgers”. 私 is a kanji character that means I. は is hiragana. This is a particle, and Japanese uses these to mark the parts of speech. Putting は after something in a sentence means it’s the topic of the sentence. ハンバーガー is katakana, because we’re borrowing the word “hamburger” from a foreign language. を is hiragana. It’s another particle. This one marks the object of a sentence. 食 is kanji. It means to eat. べます is hiragana, and it’s used to conjugate the verb “to eat”. 食べます is present tense. If it were past tense, it would be 食べました, if it was negative(don’t eat), it would be 食べません.
In terms of learning this, most people learn hiragana, then katakana, and then Kanji. Hiragana and Katakana have about 50 symbols and Kanji has over 2000, so learning Kanji takes a lot longer. If you had a very limited time to prepare for your trip, I might recommend doing Katakan and then finding a handful of Kanji that would be useful for a tourist. But in general, hiragana, katakana, and then kanji is the way to go.
edit: clarification
This is an over-generalization of the purpose of each one:
* Hiragana: pronunciation of Japanese-origin words
* Katakana: pronunciation of non-Japanese words
* Kanji: meaning of Japanese-origin words
Hiragana and katakana are syllabaries, where each character represents a syllable. Like the English alphabet, the individual characters don’t have meaning; they’re used to ‘form’ words.
On the other hand, kanji are ideograms, where each character has its own meaning. This means you can’t just write any kanji by only learning a couple dozen characters. Each kanji has to be individually memorized. There are well over 50,000 kanji in existence, but most of them are never used. Only 2,136 kanji are considered “standard” in modern Japanese and are taught in schools.
Ideally, you’d want to learn all three, but kanji will be the most difficult part. At the very least, you should memorize 100 of the most commonly-used kanji. Katakana is the easiest part, as many of the words are essentially just English terms written in syllables.
Latest Answers