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Active Oldest Votes. I think the Wikipedia article on the Japanese writing system explains it pretty well, but to summarize: Hiragana and katakana collectively referred to as kana are syllabic writing, that is, each character represents a syllable such as "ta" or "o". They're purely phonetic so they don't have direct connotations as kanji do, and both have the same set of syllables. In modern writing: Hiragana is generally used for Japanese words when they're not written in kanji, and for all the grammatical "glue" such as conjugations and particles.
Katakana is usually used for loanwords and onomatopoeia. There's no strict rule though, so you will see katakana used for other purposes as well, such as emphasis. Kanji is ideographic writing, that is, each character represents a concept or an idea.
Each character also has one or more readings, and the correct one depends on which word the kanji is part of. Many kanji such as my two examples can also act as stand-alone words.
Improve this answer. Community Bot 1. Matti Virkkunen Matti Virkkunen 3, 24 24 silver badges 20 20 bronze badges. Technically they are syllabaries rather than alphabets. Each represents a syllable which in Japanese is almost always a pair of phonetic sounds or phonemes : a consonant followed by a vowel.
You are right. I will correct it. It's still used a lot not always on till receipts in shops, supermarkets, restaurants and bars where they give an itemised list of purchases.
So each word even if it's a Japanese word is written in katakana. Some of you give examples of situations where katakana is used, but in all those examples hiragana could just as well be used instead. Can anyone suggest a reason, other than convention, why katakana is necessary? Katakana can also be used for emphasizing words, or for breaking up a string of hiragana as well, to make it easier to see word breaks.
Theoretically you could drop katakana, but it would just make text more of a jumble. It's not a big deal to remember even for school kids , and it gives an additional tool with which to transfer more meaning through text by using it for emphasis on words, or identifying words as loan words etc.
Katakana is actually convenient in 8 bit computing since it is recognizable readable that is why it was used in the days of telegraphs. They placed spaces or breaks between words in those days too. Kanji cannot be represented in 8 bits which requires 16 and hiragana in 8 bits is messy to read.
I think instead of just using romanji and being done with the extra katakana, they decided it was too foreign and had to make it Japanese. It created allot of headaches. You see Japanese do this with just about anything foreign. They not only change the original romanji word to katakana, the shorten and change it as well, so it now becomes Japanese, whatever that means.
I think if Japan would of been introduced to the Western world before they were to China, they would of adopted the English or Spanish language. Its just they were too close to China, and so they adopted everything from them. They met the Westerners too late in the game.
Now their stuck with them Chinese customs and their language, trying to make it all work in this century. There are actually four writing systems for Japanese. The non-alphabetical ones are dealt with adequately here.
These are the romaji roman script systems. This looks really odd to people who normally read things as it sounds in English. But really it is just as valid a way to write things in a Roman script as it is in Italian, French, Vietnamese, Turkish or German. The Hepburn system was produced by Dr Hepburn towards the end of the 19th century and he based his simply as he heard things and reproduced them as English sounds - eg. Historically what happened was that Dr Hepburn submitted his system about 8 times to the early Meiji government department that later became the modern Ministry of Education, Science, Sport and Technology who are actually the administrators and bosses of the Japanese language in Japan.
They always palmed him off though. By about or so, just after they had started compulsory general education including English , the Ministry realised that they needed some kind of standard roman script system. The only one commonly around was Hepburn's and it had already taken off on thins such as railway station signs and company names.
ANd as you could predict, there was no way that they were going to let a gaijin decide how to write Nihongo in any writing system. So people in the ministry got some experts and borrowed a bit from Italian, a bit from English and a bit from German and made a kind of pan-European language-based Roman script for writing Japanese.
This was submitted once, about a month before Hepburn's final submission, and was accepted at once. And it is still there. SO, yeah, I prefer Hepburn system because it makes my life easier in my lessons and doesn't do my head in. However, if a guy from here called Shota decides to write his name as 'Syouta', that would be normal for him as he would not be writing as English rather as Japanese.
That needs to respected I think, even if you cannot get your head around his thinking as to deciding to write in that way. That does my head in but, as they say, syouganai. Fall at the first hurdle. The three sets are not 'completely separate' at all; hiragana and katakana are both derived from kanji. Hiragana were developed from kanji to make writing easier for women, back in the days when everyone knew women were too stupid to study the new-fangled, learned Chinese texts imported from the big boys across the water.
That never really worked. The one thing that really annoys and exasperates me is when learners of English, on being told that 'we don't say it that way' or 'we don't use that expression', want to know Why?
Same with this. There is no reason at all for Japan to discard katakana, or discard the whole writing system and use the alphabet instead. The writing system as it is, does what it says on the tin. It works. Use it and revel in its possibilities, intricacies and foibles, instead of complaining because it ain't English.
But the logic of having to learn 4 alphabets escapes me. So you learn kanji, hiragana and katakana the latter to battle the onslaught of English , only to unlearn it all to learn the 4th alphabet at the expense of national treasure. You're right, but this article is about characters used for writing, not writing systems. There are only three Japanese sets of characters kanji, hiragana, and katakana , with romaji being a non-Japanese set of characters that are used by the Japanese.
Katakana is useless and very irritating. It screws up the pronunciation very simple words and names. Example: My name is Robert, but when changed into katakana its Roberto, Robert"o"! Where'd the "O" come from? Have you every heard a Japanese person say, "Mc Donald's"? Its frustrating to the native English persons ear. There used to be a lot more forms of kana other than hiragana and katakana.
Those archaic kana are called hentai-kana. Since kana is simplification of kanji and there are many ways to simplify and many kanji from which to simplify, there were numerous hentai-kana to each sound of Japanese.
In the last years of the 19th century, Japanese government made a good deal of effort to reduce the number of kana all the way to ONLY two sets.
I do not know if people will further reduce the number. By the way, English also has two sets of letters, the capital and the small letters. Is there any movement to unify the two for simplification? Japanese written language history is interestingly messy, according to history I read, Japanese had a spoken language first before Kanji was imported. You can guess how messy that was, trying to incorporate writings from a totally different language into an established spoken language.
I'm guessing today's written Japanese is the result of years of "incorporation". Interestingly, Korea who used Kanji before, decided to just get rid of it and made their own writing systems. That's not katakana screwing up the language, it's a basic fact of humanity that we can only speak in the phonemes that we know, and without learning the phonemes of another language, we are unable to pronounce, or for that matter even recognize, the sounds of the other language.
Should English start using Hiragana to write Japanese words that contain these sounds? Would that somehow make things better? Nope, because even if English speakers learned what these phonetics represented, unless they focused on learning Japanese, they would not be able to pronounce them the same way Japanese people do.
Where did those sounds come from? Japanese had a spoken language first before Kanji was imported. English is written in Latin alphabets, which exist to record a totally different language from English. Latin alphabets are derived from Phoenician alphabets which existed to record a totally different language from Latin. Koreans got rid of kanji or hanja in s. So it is only one generation ago. We have yet to see the full effects of the loss of Chinese characters to Korean language and society.
No one knows if Koreans would have limited vocabulary due to the loss. CH3CHO's mention of hentaigana is interesting. The different forms of hiragana come from the fact that different kanji were used as the base from which the kana were formed.
Scholars reckon that the different choice of kanji indicated some difference in pronunciation that was obvious at the time but later became lost. Study of the manyogana the style of hiragana used to write the Manyoshu, an ancient collection of poems indicates that at some time around the mid-7th century the Japanese language had at least 8 distinctly different vowel sounds that have over the centuries merged into the 5 we have today.
The hentaigana probably reflected in some part the difference in pronunciation that was lost long before the hentaigana were abolished. The interesting difference here is the the Latin alphabet was in Britain before the English language was.
Old English was in fact an inflected language, with a pretty free word order, not all that different from Latin. And the spoken language was still developing while the means to write it down was already there. So using the Latin alphabet to write Old English was nowhere near as big a jump as trying to write a highly-inflected language like Japanese using the imported writing system of a non-inflected language like Chinese. Strangerland is also right; it isn't the katakana that 'messes up' people's names, it's the phonemic structure of Japanese that insists that every consonant bar N must be followed by a vowel sound.
I assure you the gaijin insistence on putting unnecessary intonation where it isn't needed in Japanese names is just as annoying if you're the kind of person who gets annoyed at people who have accents. One thing for sure is that they wouldn't be able to read any historical documents with Kanji and more easily be brainwashed false history by their government. It may be the intention of their dropping Kanji.
Of all the reasons I read in defense of katakana, not one seems to suggest the same couldn't be done with hiragana. I think, as is common in Japan, that convention and "but we have always done it that way" trumps any real logic when it comes to writing languages in Japan. Having three different writing systems or four if romaji is included ought to be seen as idiotic from a learning perspective, but is not, because it's been done the same way for ages.
Just because you can remember them, doesn't mean it's a good, or even effective, idea. I honestly never understood why Japanese kana could utilize a new symbol to denote soft or no vowel pronunciation. We can even stretch sounds by adding a dash mark, so why not a symbol that denotes a soft or abrupt sound.
We also have a circular mark to exclusively denote "P" sounds Because you've got it backwards. Written characters are used to represent the spoken language, they do not dictate it. The Japanese language does not have the phonemes to express the sounds you are discussing, which is why the characters also do not exist. Think of it for us as splitting up the sound of a random letter in the English language into two parts - it's almost impossible to consider, as those are our phonemes.
Yet another problem I have with the damn katakana is that Japanese over-simplify many words when they "translate" foreign words. Take, for example the English word "steam". I find katakana to be a flawed system, still used because nobody has the guts to question it.
It might benefit the lazy mind, "japanizing" everything, but the way the world looks today, I find it better to actually learn about it than pretend everything is easily localized.
When all is said and done, it is "watashi wa kuruma o mita". It is actually the "WA" sound written as "HA" because it's a human language, and it makes no sense Only K, S, T, and H rows use these characters. When they use dakuten, they become G, Z, D, and B, respectively. H is the only row that uses handakuten, and it becomes P when the small circle is added.
A friend once shared the mnemonics she learned in high school with me, and they immediately helped me memorize the kana. Yeah, it may be silly. But it helps! Create your own, or try some of these. I learned this list nearly 12 years ago! The crazier and more vibrantly you can associate them in your mind, the easier it will be to memorize them. The same is true when you move on to kanji memorization.
Honestly, the best tip is to write it out as much as you can. Whenever I was bored usually in college classes… , I would make a box and mark it vertically with the consonants, and horizontally with the vowels. And then I would fill in all the spots with the right hiragana and katakana. You could also practice Japanese writing, and write right to left, and vertically.
There are also tons of easy reading resources to learn Japanese and get practice reading hiragana and katakana. Any reading and writing practice you can do will help improve your hiragana vs katakana understanding! Learn how to practice the four pillars of language learning , and it will get easier.
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