estutwehDo languages that use non-Latin alphabets (Asian, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew) have upper and lower case letters? What about serif or sans-serif? How do they show emphasis?
kender242Japanese has three alphabets (and the English alphabet… and those Arabic numbers we are all familiar with)
Hiragana (ひらがな) for native words, grammar, and morphology - it reminds me of cursive Katakana (カタカナ) it gives an unmistakable clue you are reading a foreign word - but can also be used for emphasis Kanji (漢字) borrows Chinese characters that can be read with native or borrowed sounds, but generally with the same meaning
Given those and the English letters at your fingertips they have a lot of tools to give context. Grab a newspaper or Manga sometime, even if you don’t know the words you can tell each writing system apart pretty easily.
Huh,
I lived there for three years and only learned about, Kanji, Katakana and Romanji.
Is Hiragana a more classic version of the language or is it an evolution of Katakana, that it looks similar to?
Hiragana is the standard Japanese alphabet basically… But in everyday language, Hiragana is used to construct Kanji, so you would rarely encounter actual written Hiragana unless 1) someone is pointing out the pronunciation of a Kanji, or 2) in materials for younger audiences
Katagana is used for “borrowed words” from non-Asian languages like say ice cream;l. These words never have associated Kanjis to begin with, so that’s why you see them more often
I did deploy a lot, but I recall one of my first cultural lessons and they only mentioned the three.🤷🏾
I really appreciate you taking the time to share some of your knowledge.
Thank you!
Hiragana isn’t very useful if you’re not studying the language. The only thing a tourist or the like would need it for is the names of some food on menus like soba or something like that. It’s much more important to know some basic kanji (like the difference between man and woman when you’re using the bathroom in a restaurant) and then katakana because that’s how they transliterate the foreign words.
However, if you do study Japanese you’d see hiragana on day one–it’s a crucial part of the language.