It makes more sense when you can read Japanese. It is far easier to read Japanese with their multiple writing systems mixed together than to read it all in just hiragana (their native phonetic writing system). Also much faster.
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AI_toothbrush@lemmy.zip 4 months agoI never understand this example. Other languages have words with the same pronounciation and nobody has a problem with it.
Drusas@kbin.social 4 months ago
Sabin10@lemmy.world 4 months ago
In many other languages homophones are often spelled differently. Hiragana and katakana phonetic alphabets so homophones all have the same spelling.
froh42@lemmy.world 4 months ago
German “umfahren” has entered the chat. Just with different stress it can either mean drive around someone/something or driver over someone/something.
erev@lemmy.world 4 months ago
They also denote etymology differently. I learned (3 years of high school japanese, got to like a 1st graders level if that but i did learn a lot) that hiragana is used for words that were originally Japanese, while katakana is used for words adopted from other languages. That’s why you see English translated into katakana, not hiragana. Iirc, kanji might’ve also come before wither hiragana or katakana, and unlike Chinese there is a way to understand kanji based off of its original components (there’s a name for them I can’t remember)
veloxization@yiffit.net 4 months ago
You’re correct! Katakana is indeed used to write loan words. There are of course other use cases like names of animal species (e.g. you can write 狐 or キツネ for fox, and 兎 or ウサギ for rabbit) but generally that’s where you see them.
And yes, kanji was used prior to kana and the earlier versions of kana looked a lot more like kanji, but just got simplified as time went on.
Oh, and the word you were looking for is “radicals” for the components. c:
erev@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Thanks, all of that was stuff I had learned years ago and forgot. Thanks for helping jog my memory!