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De_Narm@lemmy.world 7 months agoNah, it makes sense. You can write everything with just hiragana if you want to, in theory.
Katakana denote words from different languages, which I found really helpful when learning the language. It’s probably easier for fluent people too. There are a lot of these words.
Kanji are a lot more compact and make text a lot more readable. Japanese does not use any whitespaces so it can be tricky to separate words when using only hiragana. Instead you mostly have some kanji separated by hiragana. Some Kanji only denote a single hiragana, but usually they represent a group of them therefore saving on space too. Like other languages they have words with multiple meanings, but they have different kanji, further improving readability.
Take this with a small grain of salt, I’m by no means fluent myself, but I’ve been learning for quite some time.
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
To elaborate, words that sound have the same katakana, might have different kanji. Like how, in English, dough can rise, and a balloon can rise.
In English, you have to gather the correct meaning from context, in Japanese, there is a “preferred” alternative where these two words aren’t the same. Buuuuut, if you don’t happen to know the exact kanji word for dough-rising, you can still just use the katakana.
ElderWendigo@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
I think I get what you’re saying, but was really confused because those two uses of rise are the same word and same definition applied to different contexts.
I think the concepts you’re looking to describe are homonyms, homophones, and homographs.
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Well no, for example, kanji has two different for climb (up a ladder) and climb/ascend (into the air), which have the same katakana.
That happens quite a lot for words which have similar, but subtly distinct, meanings.