Comment on How would you explain the need for three writing systems in Japanese to a person who only has had experience with one?

Mane25@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

Just a learner of Japanese here. Japanese is difficult to read if written purely phonetically because there are a lot of homophones (words that sound the same with different meanings).

So typically kanji carries the root of words and kana is for all the grammatical parts, loan-words, and everything else. Hiragana/katakana duplicate each other but are no more redundant than lower/upper case.

Speaking as a learner, sometimes it’s easier to learn the kanji than the sound of the word so sometimes it can make learning to read easier.

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