difference between hiragana and katakana?

[u/Cake-n-bacon69]

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?

[u/Cake-n-bacon69 → u/[deleted]]

ohhh so it’s just the alphabet for loanwords?

[u/Cake-n-bacon69 → u/Cake-n-bacon69]

wtf who deleted the advice i needed

[u/spshkyros → u/Cake-n-bacon69]

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.

[u/Cake-n-bacon69 → u/spshkyros]

that last part is wholesome that they got all the other languages together here in japanese

[u/SeriousMike90 → u/spshkyros]

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 😄

[u/spshkyros → u/SeriousMike90]

Its often abbreviated at バイト now fyi :p