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.
No expert here. Just a learner of the Japanese language. And a rusty one at that.
But at very least, most verbs and adjectives written in Japanese use a kanji character for the stem and hiragana following to spell out the part that varies depending on the verb form. (The “conjugation” if you will.)
(I’m not sure how much Japanese you know, so sorry if this is stuff you already know.)
For instance “食べます” (“tabemasu”) means “to eat” and is a formal form of the verb. “食べました” (“tabemashita”) is the past tense formal form. “食べた” (“tabeta”) is an informal past tense. And there are a lot of verb forms beyond that. The character “食” is pronounced “ta” in all these cases, though the kanji also conveys not just phonetic meaning but semantic meaning. The “ます” and “ました” etc give information like tense. (Though Japanese also has forms for “to want to” and for negation etc. And these forms can be combined to mean things like “I didn’t want to eat”.)
As for katakana, I think sometimes the use of katakana for Japanese native words is a style choice. It kindof feels edgy and fresh when a Japanese word is written on katakana. You might see that a lot in advertisements and logos or slogans. Similarly foreign (to Japan/China) words written in hiragana also might make them seem… I dunno… ancient and arcane or something? Though I don’t think that covers all uses of katakana for Japanese words either.
Katakana is a newer system than kanji or hiragana from what I understand. I think part of its function (aside from the exceptions) is to switch your brain into “oh shit this word is likely to be kindof awkward for Japanese speakers” mode so folks expect different kinds pronunciaton rules.
Hope that helps a little? I confess I don’t really know the full answer to your question either.