As an English speaking person who recently got into learning Japanese, I was intrigued by the use of the three writing systems: Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana, however I could not truly understand why it is that way. I do know a bit about the history of these languages but that is not what I am interested in knowing; I wish to know what purpose these three separate systems serve in these current times to justify their existence of used simultaneously as compared to other languages having a singular writing system.
I tried to research a bit about this topic, but I couldn’t get a satisfactory answer. I thought Hiragana was supposed to be used for native words and Katakana for foreign words, but this assumption didn’t quite fit what I saw while reading manga or watching anime. I once saw someone say how Kanji was incredibly essential to the Japanese language, but I couldn’t grasp the reason, considering how these Kanji characters were seen with their hiragana pronunciation as a side-note, I knew it wasn’t worth just thinking about the explanations by myself, thus I thought of the idea of this post.
I wish to learn about the use of these writing systems from the perspective of a person who knows both Japanese and English well, is aware of how these systems are used in practical daily life and understands the trouble of someone brought up in an English medium, unable to grasp the significance of this system. This is my genuine curiosity and I do not mean to belittle the use of this system in any way.
Just a learner of Japanese here. Japanese is difficult to read if written purely phonetically because there are a lot of homophones (words that sound the same with different meanings).
So typically kanji carries the root of words and kana is for all the grammatical parts, loan-words, and everything else. Hiragana/katakana duplicate each other but are no more redundant than lower/upper case.
Speaking as a learner, sometimes it’s easier to learn the kanji than the sound of the word so sometimes it can make learning to read easier.
About the homophones, it’s also worth noting that English does the same thing. It’s why we have “to, two, too” and “right rite wright write”.
Just instead of having inconsistent memorized spellings, Japanese has memorized symbols. 同, 銅, 道, 動, 堂, 胴, 洞, etc. all being pronounced the same way = way more need for complexity in order to tell them apart.
Of course, yes, and that’s why I’m not much of an advocate for English spelling reform. Japanese has particularly a lot of them.