Might wanna mention that the character set is a bit larger with Japanese. I don’t know how much larger, but Chinese boasts something like 2000+ characters.
This isn’t the best way to describe it. The following is an oversimplification.
Hiragana is a set of 46 characters, each representing either a vowel or a consonant-vowel combo. These characters are used to spell all native Japanese words. (There’s a lot more than just this, but this is the most basic information.)
These two writing systems are called, together, kana.
Then there’s kanji, which are the symbols that mean an individual word or concept, and which are characters that were from China. 日 means “day” or “sun” and is pretty popular among beginners. (Or at least it’s in all the beginner books.)
Combined, kana and kanji are the writing system.
The person asking if they need to know katakana is actually asking a normal question for foreigners. They just need to be reminded that in Japanese they can’t expect the romanization of foreign words, because katakana is for people who speak Japanese to read foreign words. They don’t all learn the English alphabet to read foreign loanwords!
I might know what Coca-Cola is, but unless I can read コカコーラ and understand that means koka-kola, I’m not going to know if it’s being sold on a menu.
ETA; All words can be written in kana. Kanji isn’t mandatory for written communication it’s just that if you want to be proficient in the written language, you are required to know a certain number of kanji. I’d argue you need katakana more than kanji.
Dude wtf you’re all over this site, are you John Lemmy or something?
Anyways, Japanese uses different writing systems – the first two that people usually learn (Kana) are basically just symbols for syllables (also called “mora”), Hiragana and Katakana. They use a different set of “letters” which represent the same sounds (you’ll find a “ka”, “m/n”, “fu”, “o”, etc. in both, but they look different). There’s also Kanji, which is an umbrella term for the various usages of characters which were adapted from Chinese, this includes Kana but generally people don’t mean to include Kana when they say “Kanji”. One Kanji can have MANY meanings and pronunciations, due to many multiple ways in which the character was adapted from Chinese, so the writing is extremely contextual. You can generally “spell out” a Kanji with Hiragana or Katakana, often times this is used when learning new Kanji or to disambiguate meaning. It’s also one of the ways you use to type Japanese on a device/keyboard (the characters can be converted to a Kanji using software where you can pick based on a list of most common Kanji which are pronounced the way you typed).
Since Japanese doesn’t use spaces or dots or anything usually, you’ll often see all three mixed together in order to separate different words, although in modern times Katakana has especially been used for borrowings from foreign languages.
There’s also Rōmaji, which is a term for the various romanization/latinization systems for Japanese. This one is also commonly used to type Japanese text.
The JLPT is the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, you take it to get a certificate stating your Japanese language abilities and the results are ranked from N5 being the lowest (correlates to ~A1-A2 CEFR, slightly more than beginner knowledge) to N1 being the highest (~B2-C2 CEFR, high level of abilities in the language)
The “alphabet” is generally the easiest part of learning a language, and an obviously important part, so the person being unwilling to put the time into it means he probably isn’t serious enough about learning the language to actually follow it through.
Apologies if my explanation is off, I don’t speak Japanese.
I’m just going to pretend I know what all of this means and move on.
Basically asking if they are learning English and is great at the first half of the alphabet, do they really need to learn the second half?
Might wanna mention that the character set is a bit larger with Japanese. I don’t know how much larger, but Chinese boasts something like 2000+ characters.
This isn’t the best way to describe it. The following is an oversimplification.
Hiragana is a set of 46 characters, each representing either a vowel or a consonant-vowel combo. These characters are used to spell all native Japanese words. (There’s a lot more than just this, but this is the most basic information.)
Katakana is a set of 46 characters, each representing either a vowel or consonant-vowel combo. These characters are used to spell foreign words (as best as possible.) Here’s a Wikipedia article on English loanwords in Japanese.
These two writing systems are called, together, kana.
Then there’s kanji, which are the symbols that mean an individual word or concept, and which are characters that were from China. 日 means “day” or “sun” and is pretty popular among beginners. (Or at least it’s in all the beginner books.)
Combined, kana and kanji are the writing system.
The person asking if they need to know katakana is actually asking a normal question for foreigners. They just need to be reminded that in Japanese they can’t expect the romanization of foreign words, because katakana is for people who speak Japanese to read foreign words. They don’t all learn the English alphabet to read foreign loanwords!
I might know what Coca-Cola is, but unless I can read コカコーラ and understand that means koka-kola, I’m not going to know if it’s being sold on a menu.
ETA; All words can be written in kana. Kanji isn’t mandatory for written communication it’s just that if you want to be proficient in the written language, you are required to know a certain number of kanji. I’d argue you need katakana more than kanji.
Dude wtf you’re all over this site, are you John Lemmy or something?
Anyways, Japanese uses different writing systems – the first two that people usually learn (Kana) are basically just symbols for syllables (also called “mora”), Hiragana and Katakana. They use a different set of “letters” which represent the same sounds (you’ll find a “ka”, “m/n”, “fu”, “o”, etc. in both, but they look different). There’s also Kanji, which is an umbrella term for the various usages of characters which were adapted from Chinese, this includes Kana but generally people don’t mean to include Kana when they say “Kanji”. One Kanji can have MANY meanings and pronunciations, due to many multiple ways in which the character was adapted from Chinese, so the writing is extremely contextual. You can generally “spell out” a Kanji with Hiragana or Katakana, often times this is used when learning new Kanji or to disambiguate meaning. It’s also one of the ways you use to type Japanese on a device/keyboard (the characters can be converted to a Kanji using software where you can pick based on a list of most common Kanji which are pronounced the way you typed).
Since Japanese doesn’t use spaces or dots or anything usually, you’ll often see all three mixed together in order to separate different words, although in modern times Katakana has especially been used for borrowings from foreign languages.
There’s also Rōmaji, which is a term for the various romanization/latinization systems for Japanese. This one is also commonly used to type Japanese text.
The JLPT is the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, you take it to get a certificate stating your Japanese language abilities and the results are ranked from N5 being the lowest (correlates to ~A1-A2 CEFR, slightly more than beginner knowledge) to N1 being the highest (~B2-C2 CEFR, high level of abilities in the language)
The “alphabet” is generally the easiest part of learning a language, and an obviously important part, so the person being unwilling to put the time into it means he probably isn’t serious enough about learning the language to actually follow it through.
Apologies if my explanation is off, I don’t speak Japanese.