Katakana is important
In Japanese there are 4 written “alphabets” that are used on a regular basis. These 4 types of characters cover the full spectrum of the spoken Japanese language. They are:
- Kanji
- Hiragana
- Katakana
- Romaji
I’ll start with Romaji, because its the simplets. Romaji is the roman / english alphabet - everything that you are reading in this sentence ;) Many signs and advertisements in Japan love to use english words - so you will see it a lot.
Kanji are the complex pictographs that come from China. Each Kanji portrays some meaning when read - can can often be pronounced differently based on the Chinese reading (called “on-yomi”) or the Japanese reading (called “kun-yomi”). There are anywhere from 50,000 to 80,000 kanji - of which 2,000 are considered essential for daily use in Japan.
Hiragana is the Japanese alphabet and consists of about 40 unique characters - and an additional 20 or so variants using special markers (like an apostrophe). Hiragana is the first writing system learned by Japanese children and is generally the recommended system for non-Japanese to learn first. Since Hiragana represents sounds instead of ideas (just like “a” represents “ahhh” in the english alphabet), Japanese can be completely written using these characters, however it is rarely done outside of children’s books.
Katakana has the same foundation as Hiragana - it is an alphabet with 40+ unique characters each representing a sound. The difference between Katakana and Hiragana is that Katakana is used to spell words that come from foreign languages (”loan words”).
The reason Katakana is important is that I find most food is labeled in Katakana. If you can read those characters you can often figure out what the word is in English (occasionally it’ll be a french or other word).
チース chi-su “cheese”
ポテト potato “potato”
チリソース chiriso-su “chili sauce”
ビール bi-ru “beer”
March 5th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
good article. i’ve been learning hirigana and kanji along the way, but I’ve completely ignored katakana. Including variants and glottal stops i know 49 hirigana and 20 kanji, so I still think i have a couple hirigana that i haven’t encountered.
March 5th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
Spree, thats really good. Hiragana is still quite important - so looks like you got that down (very helpful when trying to learn japanese words). The variants are often easier to remember than the original.