As a Japanese learner, katakana is a godsend. It’s like reading a scientific paper in English and having all the Latin in italics, as an indicator that “don’t worry this is a foreign word, you’re not an idiot for not recognizing it.” Especially because most katakana words are derived from English (or words you’d recognize as an English speaker) so it’s just a matter of saying it over and over until the pieces click into place. Example: オーストラリア = Oosutoraria = Oh-s-t-rah-ree-uh = Australia.
Also outside of picture books for young children, Japanese doesn’t use spaces and has way fewer sounds than most languages which results in a LOT of homonyms and similar words that all blends together (see other comment YouTube link). So having three writing systems in one really helps convey meaning and makes reading much faster.
I thought that would be the case for me too, but man I just hate katakana. I find it so difficult to read compared to hiragana, even after 1.5 year of daily learning
Don’t get me wrong, I still struggle with reading it quickly and fluently compared to hiragana (although that’s often because the words are clunky af loanwords), but I’d still much rather it exist than not. かれはぼうなすをもらったらおうすとらりあに行くつもり is a bugger to read without katakana.
I leaned Japanese in a mixed-nationality school where I was one of the only English-native students. I did not envy their struggles with katakana, as I’m sure the Chinese-native students did not envy my struggles with kanji! (Meanwhile everyone else just struggled lol.)
We also use two different alphabets. Lower case and upper case. Upper case is basically Latin script optimised for stone carving, lower case was developed for ink writing (I think in the Carolingian era). Now we use both at the same time without batting an eye.
Add cursive in the mix and we also have 78 letters instead of 26.
Ha, never thought of it like that. Although everyday Japanese also uses the alphabet occasionally, so you kind of have 4 alphabets to learn? 5 if you count Arabic numbers?
They also denote etymology differently. I learned (3 years of high school japanese, got to like a 1st graders level if that but i did learn a lot) that hiragana is used for words that were originally Japanese, while katakana is used for words adopted from other languages. That’s why you see English translated into katakana, not hiragana. Iirc, kanji might’ve also come before wither hiragana or katakana, and unlike Chinese there is a way to understand kanji based off of its original components (there’s a name for them I can’t remember)
You’re correct! Katakana is indeed used to write loan words. There are of course other use cases like names of animal species (e.g. you
can write 狐 or キツネ for fox, and 兎 or ウサギ for rabbit) but generally that’s where you see them.
And yes, kanji was used prior to kana and the earlier versions of kana looked a lot more like kanji, but just got simplified as time went on.
Oh, and the word you were looking for is “radicals” for the components. c:
Specifically in the case of Japanese language, the current orthography highly depends on the use of kanji to remove ambiguities from a purely phonetic notation in either kana system.
As a side note, Korean language also used to be written with hanja (Chinese characters) mixed in with hangul (native phonetic alphabet). The shift from mixed hangul-hanja notation to pure hangul was gradual and the major contribution that made it possible was the modernized orthography rules that allows visual differentiation of homophones when written down while adding some complexity. It’s not perfect, but it works.
So, while many argue that kanji is essential to Japanese or hanja needs to be reintroduced in Korean for examples cited, I think the definitive reason is that the japanese speakers themselves doesn’t feel the overwhelming need to switch right now. If they chose to
introduce a purely kana orthography and had enough funding and political will, that’s how they will roll.
hey just wanted to ask: what’s up with the circle-bits in korean characters? they’re really unique, I just have no idea what they indicate (if anything) and always wondered…
As a side note, Korean language also used to be written with hanja (Chinese characters) mixed in with hangul (native phonetic alphabet). The shift from mixed hangul-hanja notation to pure hangul was gradual
Oh good, someone already pointed this out!
I lived in Korea in the mid-aughts, and at that time hanja were pretty obviously on their last breath. The old man who ran the convenience store across from the school showed us how he was studying hanja, and in Korean class I learnt the hanja for Busan, the city I lived in. But that was it. I almost never saw anything about hanja otherwise, other than on old monuments and such. Hangul was pretty close to 100%.
After that, 紙に神の髪を描く
(Kami ni kami no kami o kaku)
I wish Japanese had 1.5–2x the number of sounds it has presently… Without Kanji it’s unreadable, but since the advent of English gairaigo, it’s rapidly becoming a weird weird English language anyway…
Because there are a lot of words that sound nearly identical, way more than in English. For speech you have pitch accent, but you can’t achieve that with writing. I’m not saying it’s a good system, but at least it makes a bit of sense. But it is pretty stupid to have 2 literally identical alphabets which just look different
Considering conlangs exist where they show pitch by having a diacritic above/below the syllable, it is pretty possible. Just not likely to achieve wide spread adoption in an established language
You don’t need conlangs for that. Vietnamese does it. It’s another language that originally used Chinese writing system and then its own derivative thereof before the Romanisation came in that ks to Portuguese missionaries and then French colonialists starting in the 16th century.
Edit: although you could almost argue that romanised Vietnamese writing almost is a conlang, or at least a con-writing system, given how it was imposed on the language from the outside for the convenience of outsiders, and it has to really stretch to accommodate the Vietnamese language’s natural features.
Katakana (one of the two phonetic alphabets) is for foreign words and it’s not exactly the same - Katakana has more variations to represent different sounds basically unused in actual Japanese-origin words. For example there’s the ヴ character pronounced like “vu” but no such sound is used in Japanese words. It gives an immediate visual indicator that the word is taken from another language so it’s not like they made it just because.
To be fair we have two alphabets upper case and lower case. The hiragana and katakana are basically the same. One to one equivalency between them. The kanji does add a lot of complexity.
I get that this is funny, but all I can see is a reduction in the number of lines. That sounds like a win to me.
But yes, there are some sentences in English that look really stupid when you write them out too. Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.
No it adds variety to the look of writing, each character is a syllable not a single sound (mostly) so they use fewer characters for per syllable, having two syllabary systems means that there’s more visual distinctness per word. I’m not a Japanese speaker so don’t take my word for it, but no they’re very much not stupid it’s a clever system and one that’s related to the history and culture of Japan.
Nah, it makes sense. You can write everything with just hiragana if you want to, in theory.
Katakana denote words from different languages, which I found really helpful when learning the language. It’s probably easier for fluent people too. There are a lot of these words.
Kanji are a lot more compact and make text a lot more readable. Japanese does not use any whitespaces so it can be tricky to separate words when using only hiragana. Instead you mostly have some kanji separated by hiragana. Some Kanji only denote a single hiragana, but usually they represent a group of them therefore saving on space too. Like other languages they have words with multiple meanings, but they have different kanji, further improving readability.
Take this with a small grain of salt, I’m by no means fluent myself, but I’ve been learning for quite some time.
Like other languages they have words with multiple meanings, but they have different kanji, further improving readability.
To elaborate, words that have the same katakana, might have different kanji. Like how, in English, dough can rise, and a balloon can rise.
In English, you have to gather the correct meaning from context, in Japanese, there is a “preferred” alternative where these two words aren’t the same. Buuuuut, if you don’t happen to know the exact kanji word for dough-rising, you can still just use the katakana.
I think I get what you’re saying, but was really confused because those two uses of rise are the same word and same definition applied to different contexts.
I think the concepts you’re looking to describe are homonyms, homophones, and homographs.
I know it’s a rhetorical question, but It’s a result of the popularization of ideograms during the spread of writing technology in their region, as opposed to the representation of concepts through only patterns of a small set of character seen in Europe which later spread to the far west. They’re far from the only culture to make the choice.
Japanese is whacky… Like why not just pick one alphabet instead of using 3 different ones? Are they stupid?
As a Japanese learner, katakana is a godsend. It’s like reading a scientific paper in English and having all the Latin in italics, as an indicator that “don’t worry this is a foreign word, you’re not an idiot for not recognizing it.” Especially because most katakana words are derived from English (or words you’d recognize as an English speaker) so it’s just a matter of saying it over and over until the pieces click into place. Example: オーストラリア = Oosutoraria = Oh-s-t-rah-ree-uh = Australia.
Also outside of picture books for young children, Japanese doesn’t use spaces and has way fewer sounds than most languages which results in a LOT of homonyms and similar words that all blends together (see other comment YouTube link). So having three writing systems in one really helps convey meaning and makes reading much faster.
I thought that would be the case for me too, but man I just hate katakana. I find it so difficult to read compared to hiragana, even after 1.5 year of daily learning
Don’t get me wrong, I still struggle with reading it quickly and fluently compared to hiragana (although that’s often because the words are clunky af loanwords), but I’d still much rather it exist than not. かれはぼうなすをもらったらおうすとらりあに行くつもり is a bugger to read without katakana.
Amazing if your fluent in English, but lord have mercy if your main language is anything else!
I leaned Japanese in a mixed-nationality school where I was one of the only English-native students. I did not envy their struggles with katakana, as I’m sure the Chinese-native students did not envy my struggles with kanji! (Meanwhile everyone else just struggled lol.)
We also use two different alphabets. Lower case and upper case. Upper case is basically Latin script optimised for stone carving, lower case was developed for ink writing (I think in the Carolingian era). Now we use both at the same time without batting an eye.
Add cursive in the mix and we also have 78 letters instead of 26.
Ha, never thought of it like that. Although everyday Japanese also uses the alphabet occasionally, so you kind of have 4 alphabets to learn? 5 if you count Arabic numbers?
I had to はし (hashi) over the はし because I forgot my はし at home.
Same word phonetically, three meanings. With Kanji it’s easy.
I never understand this example. Other languages have words with the same pronounciation and nobody has a problem with it.
In many other languages homophones are often spelled differently. Hiragana and katakana phonetic alphabets so homophones all have the same spelling.
They also denote etymology differently. I learned (3 years of high school japanese, got to like a 1st graders level if that but i did learn a lot) that hiragana is used for words that were originally Japanese, while katakana is used for words adopted from other languages. That’s why you see English translated into katakana, not hiragana. Iirc, kanji might’ve also come before wither hiragana or katakana, and unlike Chinese there is a way to understand kanji based off of its original components (there’s a name for them I can’t remember)
You’re correct! Katakana is indeed used to write loan words. There are of course other use cases like names of animal species (e.g. you can write 狐 or キツネ for fox, and 兎 or ウサギ for rabbit) but generally that’s where you see them.
And yes, kanji was used prior to kana and the earlier versions of kana looked a lot more like kanji, but just got simplified as time went on.
Oh, and the word you were looking for is “radicals” for the components. c:
Thanks, all of that was stuff I had learned years ago and forgot. Thanks for helping jog my memory!
Specifically in the case of Japanese language, the current orthography highly depends on the use of kanji to remove ambiguities from a purely phonetic notation in either kana system.
As a side note, Korean language also used to be written with hanja (Chinese characters) mixed in with hangul (native phonetic alphabet). The shift from mixed hangul-hanja notation to pure hangul was gradual and the major contribution that made it possible was the modernized orthography rules that allows visual differentiation of homophones when written down while adding some complexity. It’s not perfect, but it works.
So, while many argue that kanji is essential to Japanese or hanja needs to be reintroduced in Korean for examples cited, I think the definitive reason is that the japanese speakers themselves doesn’t feel the overwhelming need to switch right now. If they chose to introduce a purely kana orthography and had enough funding and political will, that’s how they will roll.
hey just wanted to ask: what’s up with the circle-bits in korean characters? they’re really unique, I just have no idea what they indicate (if anything) and always wondered…
Oh good, someone already pointed this out!
I lived in Korea in the mid-aughts, and at that time hanja were pretty obviously on their last breath. The old man who ran the convenience store across from the school showed us how he was studying hanja, and in Korean class I learnt the hanja for Busan, the city I lived in. But that was it. I almost never saw anything about hanja otherwise, other than on old monuments and such. Hangul was pretty close to 100%.
After that, 紙に神の髪を描く (Kami ni kami no kami o kaku)
I wish Japanese had 1.5–2x the number of sounds it has presently… Without Kanji it’s unreadable, but since the advent of English gairaigo, it’s rapidly becoming a weird weird English language anyway…
Vid related: https://youtu.be/pW4AiEqKGto
So what? English has eye, I and aye. Same pronunciation, different writing. You don’t need three writing systems for that.
The Japanese alphabets are phonetic so all homophones have the same spelling. In your example all the words are spelled differently.
Because there are a lot of words that sound nearly identical, way more than in English. For speech you have pitch accent, but you can’t achieve that with writing. I’m not saying it’s a good system, but at least it makes a bit of sense. But it is pretty stupid to have 2 literally identical alphabets which just look different
Considering conlangs exist where they show pitch by having a diacritic above/below the syllable, it is pretty possible. Just not likely to achieve wide spread adoption in an established language
You don’t need conlangs for that. Vietnamese does it. It’s another language that originally used Chinese writing system and then its own derivative thereof before the Romanisation came in that ks to Portuguese missionaries and then French colonialists starting in the 16th century.
Edit: although you could almost argue that romanised Vietnamese writing almost is a conlang, or at least a con-writing system, given how it was imposed on the language from the outside for the convenience of outsiders, and it has to really stretch to accommodate the Vietnamese language’s natural features.
Katakana (one of the two phonetic alphabets) is for foreign words and it’s not exactly the same - Katakana has more variations to represent different sounds basically unused in actual Japanese-origin words. For example there’s the ヴ character pronounced like “vu” but no such sound is used in Japanese words. It gives an immediate visual indicator that the word is taken from another language so it’s not like they made it just because.
To be fair we have two alphabets upper case and lower case. The hiragana and katakana are basically the same. One to one equivalency between them. The kanji does add a lot of complexity.
Because this is what Japanese would look like of they didn’t use kanji.
I get that this is funny, but all I can see is a reduction in the number of lines. That sounds like a win to me.
But yes, there are some sentences in English that look really stupid when you write them out too. Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.
Why doesn’t English fix its spelling?"
Unique English word misspellings are like our kanji.
No it adds variety to the look of writing, each character is a syllable not a single sound (mostly) so they use fewer characters for per syllable, having two syllabary systems means that there’s more visual distinctness per word. I’m not a Japanese speaker so don’t take my word for it, but no they’re very much not stupid it’s a clever system and one that’s related to the history and culture of Japan.
Nah, it makes sense. You can write everything with just hiragana if you want to, in theory.
Katakana denote words from different languages, which I found really helpful when learning the language. It’s probably easier for fluent people too. There are a lot of these words.
Kanji are a lot more compact and make text a lot more readable. Japanese does not use any whitespaces so it can be tricky to separate words when using only hiragana. Instead you mostly have some kanji separated by hiragana. Some Kanji only denote a single hiragana, but usually they represent a group of them therefore saving on space too. Like other languages they have words with multiple meanings, but they have different kanji, further improving readability.
Take this with a small grain of salt, I’m by no means fluent myself, but I’ve been learning for quite some time.
To elaborate, words that have the same katakana, might have different kanji. Like how, in English, dough can rise, and a balloon can rise.
In English, you have to gather the correct meaning from context, in Japanese, there is a “preferred” alternative where these two words aren’t the same. Buuuuut, if you don’t happen to know the exact kanji word for dough-rising, you can still just use the katakana.
I think I get what you’re saying, but was really confused because those two uses of rise are the same word and same definition applied to different contexts.
I think the concepts you’re looking to describe are homonyms, homophones, and homographs.
Well no, for example, kanji has two different for climb (up a ladder) and climb/ascend (into the air), which have the same katakana.
That happens quite a lot for words which have similar, but subtly distinct, meanings.
I know it’s a rhetorical question, but It’s a result of the popularization of ideograms during the spread of writing technology in their region, as opposed to the representation of concepts through only patterns of a small set of character seen in Europe which later spread to the far west. They’re far from the only culture to make the choice.