Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji help!! I'm confused!?

Question

I am going to be learning Japanese this year at school. But It is vacation time and I want to start getting a fair idea of Japanese before school starts. So can some one please explain these for me:

What is Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji?

Which one is Japanese?

Which do they speak or write the most?

Please answer the best you can.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

alrighty then,



Hiragana = is one of the main ways of writing in japanese

Katakana = this is normally used for borrowed words from other language. For example, Camera in Japanese is Kamera, Orange in Japanese is Orenji, Lion in Japanese is Raion.



Kanji is the calligraphy which the japanese adopted from the chinese, it is pronounced differently but written down the same as chinese.



They have two ways of pronouncing words, for example, Fire ( 火)in Japanese is both "Ka" and "Hi". When they use these different words depends on the circumstance, Hi is used when talking about Fire on its own but the Japanese word for volcano is ( 火山) which combines the kanji of both fire and mountain to mean volcano. (Ka from Fire, Zan from Mountain) so in Japanese Volcano is basically "Fire mountain" which kinda makes sense dosen't it?



So Ka is used when combined with another kanji and Hi is used to mean fire on its own.



SO to sum up,



Kanji is from Chinese

Katakana is used for foreign words but is Japanese

Hiragana is used for Japanese



They mostly use a mixture of all 3 but for the word fire, they would use the kanji symbol for hi (火) rather than the hiragana symbol for hi (ひ )



With Japanese it is pronounced exactly how it is spelt so Camera in japanese is Kamera and is pronounced like this:



Ka - me (me as in metallica) -ra (ra as in the ramones)



Both katakana and hiragana have 46 letters in both alphabets whilst the number of Kanji is more than 40,000 but my japanese friend dosen't know that many. She says she knows about a quarter and only about 2,000-3,000 are used in everyday situations.



Speaking Japanese is very easy, i got full marks in my GCSE speaking and i didn't revise for it, Writing and Reading is a kick in the teeth though

Answer 2

Well...first off..They are all Japanese =]



Hiragana is the basic writing system they use, and is made up of 46 basic characters, which are all based off of the sounds あ a, い i, う u, え e, and お o.



Katakana is the writing system used to write foreign words, onomatopoeia expressions, or to add emphasis to a word, like italics. They have the exact same sounds as Hiragana, but just different characters to represent them.



Kanji, are the characters that are derived from Chinese characters. They can be converted to Hiragana, and are used to represent things. One Kanji can have several meanings. There are about 2,000 Kanji that are used in everyday situations, but there are about 40,000 Kanji all together, but most of them aren't used. In a nut shell, you will eventually be able to interpret Chinese writing, if you study Kanji to the fullest, because the characters have the same meaning..BUT Japanese and Chinese have different names for the Kanji.



I would say that they are all used fairly equally, but if you were to break it down Hiragana and Kanji would be used the most.



I hope this helps =]

Answer 3

First, Japanese is not so easy for language amateur to understand through Yahoo's Q & A. Please take a lot of time to study them.



Hiragana, Kanakana and Kanji are all Japanese characters.



Hiragana is sort of Japanese alphabet basically. Infant starts to know these first.



Katakana is similar as Hiragana which is actually corespondent to its Hiragana each one by one but usually for the words from foreign countries(borrowed words) or some emphasis or exaggeration.



For example, あ　is Hiragana of Ah and ア　is Katakana of same Ah.

There is no capital letter without some special exception in Japanese.



Most of all Japanese Kanji are from Chinese but the content may have been changed in some of them during the long history.



On speaking and listening, you don't need to consider which is which for these three characters but just need to construct Japanese grammar with Japanese vocabulary. Hiragana is essential for it.



On reading and writing, you must comprehend a lot of Kanji because individual Kanji is ideographic character and in addition there are many combination of Kanji so that you need to use proper Kanji for making exact text to reading and writing.



For example, happiness is しあわせ(siawase)　or こうふく(kofuku)　in Japanese Hiragana. It is not written in Katakana in a manner as commonsense.



しあわせ　is also 幸せ　or 幸　and　こうふく　is also 幸福.



As you see Hiragana and Kanji are combined sometimes ocassionally.



I am Tom is translated into Watashi wa Tom desu which is equal to

私はトムです。 or　わたしはトムです。in Japanese.



私　Kanji

わたし　Hiragana

は　Hiragana

トム　Katakana

です　Hiragana

。　Japanese punctuation mark



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%81%B2%E3%82%89%E3%81%8C%E3%81%AA



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji

Answer 4

they are all japanese

long ago (like a reaaaaaaaaally long time ago) women wrote with hirigana, the men wrote with katakana

kanji is chinese character, but japanese, like they were taken from the chinese language and used in japanese

...so if that makes sense...

they use them just about equally...there are about 2000 kanji (used regularly)