Hi, everyone! Continuing on from my Nihongo Introduction Post, I’ll discuss with you the basics of hiragana, katakana, and kanji.
For those of you who have no idea what these words mean, basically, these are the three classifications of the characters by which the Japanese alphabet is divided into.
Normally, people start out by learning hiragana and katakana, as these are much simpler than kanji. This is because, with hiragana and katana, you are simply learning how to spell words with a phonetic alphabet (of relating to speech sounds). Thus, hiragana and katakana are your sound/syllable alphabet characters.
However, when it comes to kanji, you cannot simply rely on the syllabic characters to spell out a word. Kanji characters vary in meaning and strongly depend on the context by which the characters are used, which characters are placed beside each other, and much more.
