I recently started learning Japanese, and found out they have three separate writing systems! I'm working on hiragana now, but will I need to know the others to make my way around Japan? Not interested in writing in Japanese, just need to know enough to visit some day.
Responses (1)
You are correct...The Japanese do use three "alphabets" if you will in their written language. The first is hiragana, which is read phonetically, much like we do in English.
The second set of symbols is called katakana and it is used to adapt foreign words into the Japanese language. The third and final set is called kanji and it consists of over 5,000 characters of varying complexity. Their meaning, much like their structure can be simple and straightforward or in other cases it can be complicated with multiple meanings and deep cultural references. Kanji is by far the hardest one to learn and to grasp it, expect to spend some time learning about the Japanese culture and history. Having explained the three writing systems, I can now answer your question. The Japanese use all three languages regularly and at the same time. If you were to read a Japanese newspaper, you would see a lot of Kanji interspersed with hiragana to make the statement grammatically correct. Next to the article you might see an advertisement for a hamburger, which would have hiragana and kanji, but also katakana, because hamburger is a foreign word. I hope this answers your question and I hope you enjoy learning Japanese as much as I did.