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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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.
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