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?
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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.
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