When studying Japanese, hiragana, katakana, and kanji is essential. Katakana represents borrowed words or abbreviations, while Hiragana represents sounds. Due to the context of their use, kanji convey meaning with just one letter instead of a single syllable.
Yes, In writing Japanese, hiragana have a stroke order. The stroke order varies depending on the format, such as top to bottom, left to right, etc. It is easier to write if you follow the stroke order. English is the same, where the letter “f” is naturally written from top to bottom. You will have difficulty writing the letter “f” from the bottom.
It is also important to consider the hiragana stroke order when writing for others. Once you master the wrong principles for writing hiragana, your characters will look awful and difficult to read.
Furthermore, you may struggle to read other people’s writing if you don’t follow the correct hiragana stroke order. Other people’s hiragana characters will differ from yours. Hence, you may not understand other people’s writing. For digital handwriting to be read easily and quickly, the proper stroke must be known.
Therefore, hiragana stroke order is important if you want to avoid these problems. Learning hiragana requires mastering the correct stroke order.
Should you learn hiragana or katakana or kanji first?
Learning the Japanese language requires understanding its different writing systems and aspects. In light of these factors, learning a new language can be challenging.
Prior to learning Katakana and Kanji, you should master Hiragana. It is essential to know hiragana and katakana in order to read kanji (also called kunyomi and onyomi).
You have come to the right place if you’ve been looking for answers to these questions, since this article will explain why you should study Japanese in this particular order. Let’s begin.
How many Japanese alphabets are there?
1. Hiragana
This phonetic system is the basis for the Japanese written language. This phonetic system represents every Japanese sound. It is theoretically possible to write with hiragana in any form. Spaces are rarely used in Japanese texts, so hiragana is not always used. Kanji and hiragana characters must appear in a Japanese text.
A total of 46 hiragana characters exist in hiragana. There is no difference in meaning between these characters.
In Japanese, hiragana serve many important functions.
Hiragana is for creating grammatical structure
Any Japanese sentence needs hiragana to add grammatical structure. When added to a word, it can change its meaning completely. Without hiragana symbols, you will have trouble understanding some words.
Hiragana is used for writing
Hiragana characters are commonly used to write Japanese words. Hiragana is used exclusively in many Japanese words, as previously mentioned. You can use a hiragana symbol instead of a kanji character when you’re not sure which character to use.
hiragana is utilized for showing the pronunciation of a word
There may be difficulty determining a word’s pronunciation when a Japanese text contains unusual kanji symbols. Furthermore, a hiragana character accompanied by the kanji symbol would make it easier to understand. When used in this way, hiragana symbols are known as yomigana and furigana. When a Japanese word has no equivalent kanji, hiragana can be used instead.
2. Katakana
Katakana is another option besides hiragana. The characters in hiragana correspond to syllables or sounds. In order to develop a good understanding of the Japanese language, beginners should learn katakana as soon as possible.
What are katakana symbols used for?
Katakana symbols can be used to express a variety of things. The Japanese language also contains many important non-Japanese words. A borrowed or foreign object is often represented by katakana. English and other languages have influenced several words in Japanese. For words borrowed from other languages, katakana is used.
Katakana symbols are used to represent foreign words over 80% of the time.
Using katakana makes Japanese easier for English speakers. When you learn katakana, you will be able to identify many words that have been borrowed from English.
Katakana symbols are also found for:
Names of some animals
Scientific words that don’t have any specific Japanese equivalent
Company names – the companies can be either foreign or local ones
Robot-speech – this refers to when Japanese texts are written as if robots are talking
Names of foods – this is particularly true for plant and animal foods as well as foreign foods
Onomatopoeia – these are words that are written in the same way as what they represent
Adding stylistic purposes to texts
Putting emphasis on some texts
As well as the uses described above, katakana characters can also be useful in several other situations.
3.Kanji
Japanese has three alphabets: kanji, hiragana, and hiragana. A kanji symbol can be seen as a logogram, i.e. a picture that represents a concept, idea, or word. Japanese uses kanji script to give more clarity and meaning to its writing.
The number of kanji symbols in Japanese exceeds 50,000. Most native Japanese speakers don’t even know more than 10 percent of these characters, so don’t worry about them. Learners should focus on the first 2,000 kanji characters. It is from there that you can begin learning more kanji symbols.
What are kanji characters used for?
Typically, kanji symbols are important when you want to describe certain content-heavy words. These words may include verbs, adverbs, nouns, as well as adjectives. As a result of this, you don’t need kanji if you only want to learn how to speak and listen to the Japanese language.
However, when it comes to writing and reading, you cannot do without knowing some important kanji characters. Kanji will probably account for over 40% of the printable symbols in an average Japanese newspaper. Therefore, if you want to read newspapers, books, food menus, and other things correctly, you need to familiarize yourself with kanji characters.
It is noteworthy that some people consider Japanese to have a fourth writing system which is called romaji. However, you should understand that romaji is not a real writing script on its own, but it is just a way of Romanizing Japanese. Romaji is only used for making it easy for foreigners to have a quick understanding of the Japanese language.