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
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