What is the difference between the Japanese alphabets and where/how are each used?

Question

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

Answer 1

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