This might sound like an obvious question but do the differences between hiragana and katakana… - Feed Post by Whinzer9
This might sound like an obvious question but do the differences between hiragana and katakana become more obvious when you advance? I'm curious about the process. I've heard the differences before in how they are used but its still confusing.
posted by Whinzer9
Comments 7
when your vocabulary gets bigger you it gets way easier to tell the difference and when to use what. :) so keep practicing it will come :) Fight!
Hee thanks. ^.^
Hiragana is just used either by itself to express words of a Japanese origin, or together with kanji compounds. Again, to express words of Japanese origin. Katakana is mainly used for words of a foreign origin - whether or not the meaning stays the same. It can also be used on TV because it looks cooler(?), or in science books for animal names. I found out the last one when working at a lower level high school and asking people to write katakana words, as they come from different languages, and they started writing ネコ、イヌ, etc. Whoa, wait, wait, wait...
Katakana is also used to emphasize words, especially in mangas. It is used as a substitute for vegetables/animals and other words that presents very hard kanji to read and write(for instance 麒麟・キリン キノコ・木野子 and so on) and mostly for words that have a foreign origin (but there are some exceptions like 衛星 and 椅子車)- The kanji you have listed for きのこ is incorrect, unless you mean the place name in Chiba prefecture...
Out of curiosity, where have you seen animals or plants written primarily in katakana? Outside of very specific places - high school biology and science textbooks - I haven't seen katakana used for them. - Mostly in manga ;)
And yeah, I don't know why I prompted that... i meant 茸 ^^ - Ahhh that explains why they used katakana in some utaite videos that I watched. >.<
