I’m vaguely aware there’s something like 3 alphabets kanji, hiragana, and katakana. I also read that katakana is used for foreign words, but for some words there is a way to use all 3 alphabets. I guess im more so wondering what would be the appropriate use for each, so F.E, mint. I found a kanji and katakana but also maybe hiragana way. 造幣局 ミント みんと
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Thinking of it like an alphabet is what will make you confused. It’s a syllabary. So while there are 3 parts of the writing system, they exist to differentiate words. Hiragana words generally have a kanji, but sometimes it’s easier to understand when written out in hiragana because some kanji are harder to read. Then katakana is used for foreign adopted words.
Katakana is easy to knock out: this is almost exclusively used for foreign words. This indicates that the word is not native to Japanese and is not intended to mean anything that may be similar to an existing Japanese word. However, there are some exceptions where katakana is used to write native words to look “cooler”. “Ramen” is often seen written as ラーメン on shop fronts, for example. The other exception is when foreign words become more normal to use compared to the native word. Milk is “Gyūnyū”, but ミルク”miruku” is a common alternative.
So why have kanji and hiragana?
Hiragana is a way to literally spell out words. The problem is that there isn’t a way to specifically distinguish what the word means visually and requires context to figure out. For example, take ふじさん “Fujisan”. It this Mr Fuji, or Mount Fuji? In contrast, writing it out with kanji (ふじ山) makes it clear that it is referring to the mountain (山). If you see さくら (“sakura”) – is this referring to the cherry blossom or the girl’s name, which in turn changes which syllable to emphasise? (SA-ku-ra vs sa-KU-ra)
Your example is a classic case of ambiguity. What “mint” are you referring to? A company might call their ice cream flavour ミント, borrowing from the foreign “mint”. But 造幣局 is not something you put in your mouth. That’s the mint used to manufacture coinage. In contrast, みんと doesn’t mean anything in Japanese, as it isn’t a Japanese word.
And that’s an ambiguity that English has that kanji does away with (similarly with Chinese). The problem with kanji is that it requires memorisation of lots of unique characters. Otherwise you literally cannot read the text.
Hence Japanese combines three different writing systems. One for foreign words. One to spell out every word at a basic level for anyone to access, and one for clarity.
People who ask this always forget English has two alphabets too.
Katakana is used for loan words.
Hiragana is used for most Japanese words.
Kanji is used for words borrowed from Chinese hundreds of years ago.
Hiragana and Katakana are very similar and more like the difference between Latin alphabet written in cursive and printed rather than completely different systems.
They are both syllabries where each character represents a syllable and every commonly used character in hiragana has a corresponding charterer in katakana. Some of them look very similar so you can tell they are the same others not so much.
Katakana are mostly used to write down foreign words and loan words.
Kanji is the writing system imported from China.
While the Hiragana and katakana only have a few dozen characters each. Kanji has thousands of characters.
Kanji mostly represents meaning rather than sound. And the same Kanji character can have multiple different readings.
In normal writing much is written in Kanji with hiragana interspersed to represent syllables necessary to represent grammar and relationship between words. Foreign loan words where they appear are written in Katakana and in rare cases some foreign words in Latin alphabet are thrown in for good measure.
Katakana is only used for non-Japanese words – it’s a purely phonetic alphabet used to denote that a given word is foreign. It should only be used for loanwords or foreign words.
Hiragana is used for standard, work-a-day Japanese. It’s a straightforward choice if you just want to express a Japanese word. It’s phonetic, like katakana, so you can see how something should be pronounced just by reading it.
Kanji is the traditional alphabet. It’s *not* phonetic, so unless you know what the symbol means, the symbol by itself doesn’t tell you how to pronounce it… but each character is unique, and lets you express more with less characters.
Example: “Moon Rabbit” in hiragana is つきのうさぎ – “tsuki no usagi”. That’s writing it purely phonetically. You can match the characters to the syllables: “tsu-ki-no-u-sa-gi”.
But we had to use six characters to write that, and kanji has dedicated characters for both “moon” and “rabbit”. So you can be more efficient (and, many would say, write more elegantly) by using 月の兎.
In your case, you want to translate mint, as in the herb? That would be ミント in katakana, as there’s no Japanese word for it.
The kanji you’ve found, 造幣局, is the Japanese Mint Office, who design and make Japanese coinage.
As you’ll have discovered, katakana and hiragana are two different ways of transcribing the same set of sounds (the “gojū on”, or “fifty sounds”). But they have different uses, most of which people have already mentioned. Here are a couple of points more/elaboration.
As well as the other things people have mentioned, katakana is (or was) used in transcription contexts, such as telegrams, military signals and computer input forms, where accuracy is/was particularly important. Its angular shape makes it hard to misinterpret.
In normal, written Japanese, you’ll find hiragana and kanji interspersed in the same sentence, doing different things. Basically, the kanji carry concepts, and the hiragana carry grammar. And there may be katakana in there as well. So it’s not unusual to find something like this (“Mary drank the milk.”):
“**メアリーさんは牛乳を飲みました**” (“Mearī san wa gyūnyū o nomimashita”).*
Which breaks down as follows (and I apologise to anyone who speaks better Japanese than me if any of this is slightly techincally incorrect):
* **メアリー** (Katakana. Foreign name; best-efforts transliteration.)
* **さん** (Hiragana. Polite suffix. Grammar.)
* **は** (Hiragana. Indicating that Mary is a new sentence topic. Grammar.)
* **牛乳** (Kanji. Cow’s milk. Concept.)
* **を** (Hiragana. Indicating that cow’s milk is the sentence object. Grammar.)
* **飲** (Kanji. “no…”. Drink. Concept.)
* **みました** (Hiragana. “…mimashita”. Modifies the preceding concept – “drink” – to be a verb in the (polite) past tense – “nomimashita”. “(someone) drank”. Grammar.)
Mary (polite) (new topic) cow’s milk (object) drink (polite past tense).
In a different context, **飲** could be a noun, or part of one, likely with a different pronunciation entirely – but the concept of “drink” would be there.
(And just to put the icing on the cake – actually, I could have thrown in some latin letters there as well, by picking something like, say, “Mary bought a CD” – “**メリーさんはCDを買いました**”. There are some foreign abbreviations that normally get written as-is.)
*The horizontal bars over the latin letters ī and ū, and at the end of “**メアリー**”, indicate long vowel sounds.
Japanese had a spoken language first. They imported the written language from their neighbor, China. This is where Kanji come into play, and why Kanji can be hard to *properly pronounce*. In Chinese you combine characters to make new words, but you still pronounce the characters the same. Japanese had different oral language words than some Chinese words, so those combinations get read completely differently. The writing system is obviously not without faults.
So, Katakana was devised by monks and introduced as a supplemental writing system taking radicals from Chinese characters. It was only taught to men.
Japanese women *also* wanted to write, so they made Hiragana to fulfill the same need as Katakana, taught that to their kids, and Hiragana takes over since more people learned it, and now Katakana is basically used for loan words.
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