why do the japanese use 3 writing systems and what are each used for - Feed Post by Ghosts
why do the japanese use 3 writing systems and what are each used for
posted by Ghosts
Comments 8
Japanese rescripted Chinese characters. Katakana being "cursive". Hiragana was made because women weren't allowed to write So they developed a writing system to communicate. (basically speaking) and Kanji is the same Chinese characters but there is om / kan meaning so different meanings in Chinese then Japanese. So I guess when using Kanji it's "like" abbreviations.
Katakana = for foreign words eg. TV = テレビ, London = ロンドン
Hiragana = can be for everything apart from foreign words
Kanji = used for nouns, verbs and adjectives, you can use hiragana for every word, but once you get more advanced you will start to use kanji, as it differentiates 2 words that can sound the same :
eg. 効く（きく）to be effective
聞く （alsoきく）to hear, to listen
not all katakana is used for foreign language.
it can be also used for a slang or emphasis or sound.
like 本気 (ほんき）but usually written as マジ or seriously.
another example ククク <<< sound of evil laugh
katakana also used for names of non-japanese person.- Yeah, Onomatopoeia are also in katakana, but let's not confuse the new guy with loads of exceptions 8'D
- agreed.
I'll say Katakana is a retranscription of sounds (it can be a foreing words, a noun, a random sound like loughing or crying for example, also it can be use for a japanese words we just heard, but it's more common to use hiragana).
Hiragana is the writting of japanese words, which has a Kanji writting or, at less, japanese roots.
Kanji is used for understand words more easily (yeah, even if it's hard to learn it). With Kanji, we can separate words easier than just hiragana, and we can know about what word we are speaking for words which sound the same.
So, at least, even if at the first time you don't understand why there are so many things to learn, you'll see that each alphabetic system has its own utility when you'll study japanese enough ^^
Katakana does seem kind of redundant (just my unpopular opinion). Hiragana has also been used for sound effects and foreign words.
In English, upper-case alphabet letters seem redundant, since the exact same sounds can be made using just all lower-case alphabet letters. The current situation with katakana and hiragana doesn't really seem all that different. One or two of the uses are even similar to katakana, such as using upper-case for emphasis.
Even the existence of the latin alphabet is much like kana, in the sense that it was created ultimately from Egyptian characters (similar to how kana was created from Chinese characters). If the Phoenecians, Greeks, Romans, etc. had all adopted Egyptian hieroglyphs alongside their alphabets, then we could possibly have ended up with three writing systems in English too—hieroglyphs, upper-case alphabet, and lower case alphabet. :P
