Learning a new language starts with knowing its alphabets or characters. You might know what certain words mean, but if you don't know how to read it if it's written or how to write it, it means you don't know the language.
Japanese writing system uses 3 different scripts/ set of characters unlike most languages. These 3 scripts are:
- Hiragana
- Katakana
- Kanji
Each of the scripts have different characters and most are not identical. So yeah it is a bit difficult to remember all the characters. But hey, we are all in this together, right?
Hiragana is the basic one. The one you will learn in primary level. It is used in writing most Japanese words.
Katakana is used when you want to write foreign words using Japanese characters. To differentiate between Japanese words and foreign Japanese words, this script is very useful.
Kanji is the toughest one. There are thousands of it (at least that's what I heard). Each kanji character can express a word or a scenario. I heard people saying that it's basically Mandarin, but I can't justify it as I don't know Mandarin myself.
Relation between Hiragana and Katakana:
Both these scripts have 46 characters. All these characters sound exactly the same. As I said before, the reason why katakana is used, is to differentiate between Japanese words and foreign words written using Japanese characters.
P.S. I'll try my best to keep this book up to date with all the new things that I know.
YOU ARE READING
Language Book (Japan Edition)
Non-FictionDo you want to learn Japanese? Are you interested in learning about their culture? Check out my Language book to learn Japanese with me. I will note down whatever I learned which might help you as well :)
