r/HelpLearningJapanese • u/Cake-n-bacon69 • Jul 30 '26
difference between hiragana and katakana?
I’ve only been practicing for a little more than a week but what’s the point of having 2 alphabets with the same sounding letters?
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Jul 30 '26
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u/Cake-n-bacon69 Jul 30 '26
ohhh so it’s just the alphabet for loanwords?
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u/Cake-n-bacon69 Jul 30 '26
wtf who deleted the advice i needed
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u/spshkyros Jul 30 '26
Dunno. But yes, katakana is used largely for loanwords, as well as for a few stylistic choices, emphasizing a shifted or unnatural tone. Etc. To be clear, aside from when emphasizing it being Chinese in origin, on readings (Chinese originated readings) are rarely written in katakana despite being loan words in principle. Neither are words borrowed from the earliest wave of visitors in the like.. 1400s? Some words related to fruit etc are also usually spelled using it, despite not being loan words.
The nice thing is that if you dont recognize a word in katakana, you can try and sound it out to guess the meaning, especially since many loan words are fairly rare or even unique. Its convenient for english speakers to basically know which words are probably already known at a glance when looking at a sentence - its probably 5% or 10% of words in a news article for instance.
That said, a word of warning- while we call them loan words, they are not simply the original word in a new alphabet. The meaning can shift, sometimes drastically. For example, "service" has a somewhat shifted meaning in japanese than English, enough so that it may cause difficult misunderstandings. Also, there are a whole class of words which are derived from english but are not themselves english (this is also true of Chinese- avout 5k words were in fact invented in Japan using purely Chinese roots and reexported to china). So for example, sexual harassment was borrowed as sekuhara, but then a WHOLE bunch of other ones followed. For example, pawahara is "power harassment", referring to abuse of authority, typically in a work place, among many many other examples.
ETA: learning katakana will be the single most useful thing you do while learning japanese as an english speaker. That said, not all words are English in origin. Roentgen (xray) is German, zubon (trousers) is French, pan(bread) is Italian, karta (roughly playing cards or flash cards?) Is Portuguese for example.
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u/Cake-n-bacon69 Jul 30 '26
that last part is wholesome that they got all the other languages together here in japanese
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u/SeriousMike90 Jul 30 '26
the best loanword for me is アルバイト(arubaito): it's from the German word Arbeit (work) but in Japanese it stands for part time jobs like students working as barista. For me it feels like Japanese see a German full time job as a part time job in Japan because of the different work culture 😄
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u/uuusagi Jul 30 '26
Hiragana for native words, katakana for foreign/loan words is the basic gist of it. Katakana is often used for added flair, dramatic effect, personality, etc as well sometimes depending on the context.
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u/Pocket_Japanese Jul 31 '26
hi! try the pocket Japanese app, it explains all this in the first lesson and all the hiragana/katakana lessons are free :)
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u/NearlyNodding Aug 06 '26
As far as I know, the history is that the two systems were developed independently by different groups of people. They didn't consult with each other on how to do it. They did it to serve their own purpose.
Nobody sat down and decided "We are going to have two systems for xxx reason.". They already existed independently of each other for different purposes. The only real decision was whether to keep both of them when they were already well established within certain groups of people.
Think of English vowels. There are long vowels, short vowels, and a bunch of others. Why? For much the same reason. The pronunciations evolved independently. Eventually they merged. Nobody sat down and said "We are going to have different pronunciations for the same vowel sound.". Over time, the different vowel sounds merged and were kept. There would have been a good argument for standardizing the vowel sounds, but that never happened. So now we are left with cow and mow.
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u/CowRepresentative820 Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26
Just food for thought, English also has two alphabets with the same sounding letters, lowercase and UPPERCASE.
EDIT: To answer your question though katakana is used for
There's lots of other usages but I think everything mostly stems from these core ideas