Japanese
Kana are symbols, from all 3 Japanese "alphabets".
It's phonetic.
Hiragana is like, "a ee oo eh oh, ka kee koo ke ko". Limited noises, see? no "L", hence "Waiter, this chicken is rubbery" etc. Hiragana are quite curvy. あ, い, う, え, お
Katakana has the exact same noises. They are quite pointy, sharp shapes. ア, イ, ウ, エ, オ
Kanji is the little weird picture things, like 車 is a car. Kinda looks like one from above, right? But that's a simple example, most look nothing like anything much.
Kanji for verbs and (most) nouns, hiragana for the misc shit (like conjugation and articles, "is", "on", "it", "the"), and katakana for English stuff, loan words. Mostly.
Pretty much any sentence in Japanese uses all three of those alphabets.
Like,
My name is Fred.
私 は フレッド です
"私" is Watashi, "me", Kanji.
"は" is the particle thing, "wa", meaning "this is the subject". Hiragana.
"フレッド" is Fred, literally Fu-re-do, and because it's English, it's in Katakana.
"です" is just Desu, "it is", and back to Hiragana.
OK, so 3 alphabets seems a bit complicated, but on the bright side, there's a very limited number of actual sounds.
Almost everything you say in Japanese is a double-entendre.
(, Fri 20 Jul 2018, 19:41, Share, Reply)
