this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
115 points (98.3% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35694 readers
1345 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

As an English speaking person who recently got into learning Japanese, I was intrigued by the use of the three writing systems: Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana, however I could not truly understand why it is that way. I do know a bit about the history of these languages but that is not what I am interested in knowing; I wish to know what purpose these three separate systems serve in these current times to justify their existence of used simultaneously as compared to other languages having a singular writing system.

I tried to research a bit about this topic, but I couldn't get a satisfactory answer. I thought Hiragana was supposed to be used for native words and Katakana for foreign words, but this assumption didn't quite fit what I saw while reading manga or watching anime. I once saw someone say how Kanji was incredibly essential to the Japanese language, but I couldn't grasp the reason, considering how these Kanji characters were seen with their hiragana pronunciation as a side-note, I knew it wasn't worth just thinking about the explanations by myself, thus I thought of the idea of this post.

I wish to learn about the use of these writing systems from the perspective of a person who knows both Japanese and English well, is aware of how these systems are used in practical daily life and understands the trouble of someone brought up in an English medium, unable to grasp the significance of this system. This is my genuine curiosity and I do not mean to belittle the use of this system in any way.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

As a fluent Japanese speaker, I'll give you context. Nearly all of Kanji and many words in the Japanese language have Chinese roots (in fact Kanji itself means "Han Chinese letter" in a literal sense). Of course many characters are variants when compared to Traditional or Simplified Chinese, and in terms of complexity, Japanese Kanji sits between the two.

In speaking, there are two categories of reading characters onyomi and kunyomi. Kunyomi is the unique Japanese way of saying things, and onyomi is saying a word in a way derived from Chinese. Telephone is 電話denwa in Japanese vs. 电话 dianhua in Mandarin, Society is 社会 shakai in Japanese vs. 社会 shehui in Mandarin. See how they line up closely?

Now, the question is when do you use which? As a general rule of thumb, when multiple are combined together, you use the onyomi (Chinese-derived way like the above examples). When by itself (many exceptions apply) or when followed by hiragana letters (which is called okurigana) as part of the same word, then you use the kunyomi. I'm not going to complicate things further on this topic unless anyone has questions about something they wanna know more specifically.

Prepositions and connector words in English (and, is, have, to, with, not, do, will, you get the idea) use hiragana only.

Borrowed words from foreign languages use katakana almost exclusively. Bear in mind that not everything came from English, so just putting English words with a lot of extra vowels is not sufficient to make a coherent Japanese sentence. パン (pan is from the Portuguese word for bread), and ピーマン (pi- man is from piment, the French word for pepper).

Japanese people kept kanji around because the letters give a descriptive meaning when read as written and helps reduce confusion when many words can sound similar. This was also the case for Korean (kanji is known as Hanja) and in other languages if you go back further in history, but it has largely fallen out of favour in modern times for those languages.

I'm happy to answer any followup questions about this for my fellow lemmings.