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erev@lemmy.world 7 months agoThey 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 7 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 7 months ago
Thanks, all of that was stuff I had learned years ago and forgot. Thanks for helping jog my memory!