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 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.
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