LogFAQs > #964959167

MachineJaipur posted...

Kanji is the alphabet I believe or a word for the entire writing system

kanji is the japanese word for chinese characters that they use for 50% of their words. Japanese names are almost always written in kanji, for example. Common nouns: mountain, dog, river, rain, cherry blossom, tree, etc. are going to be kanji.

hiragana was developed as a phonetic system. most particles, parts of speech, "helping words," grammatical conventions, etc. are going to be in hiragana. Kids learn to do everything in hirigana and things like video games used hiragana for speech because it's easier to put an alphabet on an NES cart than 3000 chinese characters, plus kanji looked bad in 8-bit. In terms of accessability, the government requires that important documents (i.e. taxes, voting, stuff, products, safety text) need to have the hiragana pronunciation written over the kanji. this helps less-literate japanese speakers.

katakana is another phonetic alphabet. foreign words (like computer, hamburger) and western names are going to be written in katakana "Super Mario Bros." is written in katakana, for example. Because katakana is the "cleanest" of the systems it's often used in advertising and brands because it looks cool and is less squiggly.

finally they also consider the latin alphabet as "romanji" (i.e. Roman or Latin) and consider it japanese's 4th writing system. you can write any japanese sentence in the latin alphabet, for example, and this can let a japanese person write in japanese on a western typewriter/keyboard.