What's the difference between hiragana and katakana in japanese language?

Question

Tnks.

Answer 1

One is used for traditional Japanese words and the other is used for foreign words. American names use the more angular Katakana. The third alphabet is Kanji. It is not uncommon for all three to appear in a sentence.

Answer 2

Japan and Japanese scholars were powerfully affected by the Chinese intellectual tradition. They had developed a gojuonshu (a 51 character sylabic script) which was perfectly adequate to the expression of anything in the language. But the contact with China led to an effort to adopt and adapt Chinese idographs to the expression of an entirely different language with a completely different grammactical structure.


At first they used the idographs to convey single sylables, but then they adopted the idographic meaning and conjugated them with a new and more angular script that could be writing with the same brush strokes as the idiographs, and this is called katakana.

Katakana is now used almost exclusively to write loan words from English or any other non-Japanese language, but the word for Santa Clause comes out sa n ta ku ra zu with six katakana characters.

Hiragana is now used to conjugate Kanji (Chinese characters) For example a news papers is a shin bun (two characters that together are read shinbun. The first character, shin, means new, and the second character, bun, means hear. Those readings of those two characters are "kanbun" or compond, and are the "onyomi" or sound reading, and are often quite close to the sound in Chinese. The the first character (new) has another reading: if it is followed by hiragana conjugation it becomes the Japanese adjective for new, which is (ata) ra shi i, ata being the reading for the chinese character in onyomi and the ra shi i being three hiragana sylabic characters.

See why Japanese is so complex to learn?

Answer 3

Hiragana is the simplified version of kanji. Katakana is similar to hiragana, but is only used when writing foreign words such as アメリカ, which is America. Katakana is also used in advertisement or magazines to put emphasis on a particular word. Hiragana tends to look more round and curved while katakana looks more square and sharp.

Answer 4

hiragana significant kana language. like in simple terms used generally for any be conscious and could be mixed with kanji to type words. katakana for distant places words. like united statesa. =amerika in katakana gaijin (foreigner) is a eastern be conscious so hiragana is clever. exciting factoid: our instructor advised us that Ichiro, the nicely-conventional baseball participant, has his call spelled in katakana because of the fact he have been given nicely-conventional/nicely-conventional in united statesa., no longer japan. that's strange cuz he ought to have a relatives call in kanji or something. wish that helped. ^__^

Answer 5

Japanese magazines have quite a mixture of scripts. Kanji is Chinese symbols basically with one for each word. There are some differences. One confusing item is that a Chinese symbol is pronounced one way, but the Kanji symbol copying it can be pronounced two way or three in some cases. My lovers surname is Komatsu. Ko=small or young in her name, but it is O in Oyama or Ogawa or Ozawa. Shorin is Japanese Shaolin, but the symbols for a name is Kobayashi. There are two phonetic scripts that you mention. Katakana is more angular, while Hiragana is more rounded. In mags, one see some Roman letters and Arabic numerals as well as the more traditional Japanese symbols.

Answer 6

They are two writing styles. Hiragana is more rounded, like cursive, while katakana is more angular, like printing.