Like German, the Japanese language is incredibly strict with what it allows to enter into their dictionary. And just like they already use katakana to express foreign words normally, they might stylize it by writing the English word directly, instead of using katakana. Using emoji to approximate all of this in English, it reads something like:Īs for the English alphabet, you need to remember that we speak a really common language, so a lot of people are at least passingly familiar with the alphabet. Foreign borrowings and names use katakana, but like other words, they'll switch back to hiragana for particles and whatnot. It contains all the same syllables as hiragana, except they look distinct from the other writing system, like italics and roman type. Except East Asian printing doesn't have a history of anything directly comparable to italics, so instead they use a second syllabary called katakana. So they'll spell the words out and use italics like we would with foreign borrowings. In the global age, there are a lot of new words needed, and not everything has a kanji. So they'll actually combine the two systems- use kanji to say what word you're talking about, then use hiragana to write out the rest of the inflection to clarify how that kanji is being used. Imagine if "Go" and "Do not go" looked the same. This is especially dangerous since they even use conjugation to negate verbs. But Japanese actually does conjugate their verbs and (sort of) inflect their nouns, so just using kanji would be vague. Kanji work well for Chinese which is an isolating language, where it's the order that matters. However, Japanese has a lot of homophones, so they took to using Chinese characters, kanji, instead. For example, kids learn it at a young age and can sound out words with it, and there's a poem, the Iroha, which uses every syllable once, was alphabetical order for a while, and is still the equivalent of saying the ABCs. The simplest writing system they use is hiragana.
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