hiragana katakana and kanji let's talk about it so the very first thing that I always teach in the Japanese language are the three main writing systems the reason is because the three main writing systems in Japanese is very unique and that's because usually we're used to one writing system for example in English we have the alphabet to spell everything out and to write English however in Japanese depending on a word for example we write in hiragana or katakana or we write in kanji in order to master all three writing systems all three writing systems we need to know the differences between the three main writing systems Before we jump into the differences between the three I have to explain to you that hiragana and katakana can be grouped into one category called kana or con emoji and an emoji is important to know because it is a phonetic syllabary whereas kanji is something we call an ideographic syllabary a phonetic syllabary is basically a syllabary that has characters that only represent a sound or a pronunciation what that means is for example in English an alphabet letter a character for example a can only represent a sound it doesn't represent a meaning at all and similarily con emoji or kana which includes hiragana and katakana each character can only represent a sound so the hiragana or the katakana ah can only represent that sound even though a hiragana character and a katakana character can read the same thing the difference is is how it's written for example the here gonna eat and the katakana eat are written different now before we get into the differences between hiragana and katakana I must explain to you the whole kana chart now the kana chart is pretty easy to remember as long as you know this one con so the kana syllabary starts with five main characters that you need to know which are the vowels e o and once you know this five these five letters in order then the rest is pretty easy so as long as you memorize it of course but rul is the first column the second column is kaki ku ke ko if you see a pattern here all we're doing is adding a consonant to the vowels so in the second column we're adding the consonant ke and by doing that we can derive the five characters that come after the first column so are you ill and then kaki ku ke ko the next column is sassy sassy so all we're doing is adding the consonant s or SH depending on the vowel there are exceptions of course for example the last hiragana or the last katakana is just the N consonant had nothing else there's no vowel that comes after and another concept that you need to remember is that each hiragana or katakana character represents one syllable so in English we have to clap our hands to break a word down into syllables but in Japanese each hiragana character or each katakana character can represent one syllable now going into Shahana hiragana is used for two reasons one is if we're writing a sentence particle or a grammar particle and the second reason is that we're writing terms that don't have a kanji so going into the first reason which are which is about sentence particles what a sentence particle does is it's essentially a glue that connects a term and another term in order to make meaning in a sentence for example the sentence particle ba is something that can appear in a sentence like Brooklyn on a mile I can say this I'll be taking up sentence particles in another lesson but all you need to know now is that for all sentence particles we're writing in here now for the second reason Sheena gana can be used for words that don't have a kanji adapted to it now Alex I'll go and explain this in depth when we reach kanji but essentially what country does is it replaces the dragon on characters depending on the term so the word itself so if the word or the term can be replaced with kanji then we write it in college if we cannot you can just simply write it in sadhana now going into katakana on the other hand again we have two main reasons number one is if the word is foreign derived or if it is originated from a foreign language so for example the term toilet in japanese means the the bathroom or the restroom and this comes from the word toilet in english and so since this is a foreign borrowed word we use katakana to write toilet in japanese so the second reason we used katakana is because the word itself is an onomatopoeia and an automatic pia is basically sound effects like boom pow bang these type of sound effects will be written in katakana so for example if I take out my mind are here slam dunk as you can see okay this is written in the opposite direction but over here it says slam dunk in katakana and that's because this term so that slam dunk is in English it's an English term and that's why it's written in katakana and if I flip to a random page like over here we have bung bung or o these are all sound effects and that's why they're written in katakana not here either so to recap the reason why we use hiragana is because the word is a sentence particle if it's a sentence particle then we're writing in hiragana or if the term or the word itself doesn't have a kanji then we write it in hiragana and we use katakana when the term itself is derived from a foreign language so for example if it comes from an from English comes from French Spanish or any language other than maybe Chinese it is written in katakana and for onomatopoeia or any sound effect we also write that in katakana so one quick question here if your name is Daniel but how would you write Daniel in Japanese would you use hiragana would you use katakana the answer is obviously katakana because Daniel is a foreign name so that's why we have to use katakana and finally the last writing system which is kanji and it's something that we don't have in the English language now like I said earlier kanji is an ideal graphic syllabary and what that means is that each character can represent a meaning and a pronunciation so for example the very first country that I always teach as an example to my students is music water it means water and this kanji character has two pronunciations music and C Musa and C and depending on the word or depending on that term we're using the music pronunciation or the C pronunciation I will teach you about country pronunciations and more on kanji in a later lesson but for now what you need to know is that one character can have multiple pronunciations and also a character will essentially represent a certain meaning now the striking question when it comes to kanji is that people may ask why do we use such a complicated writing system when we can just write everything in hiragana wouldn't that be much easier than having these heart like complicated characters in the middle of a sentence well that is a very good question but the answer is very straightforward a sentence is going to be really long if we write everything in hiragana and because of that the kanji has a role of abbreviating things so and like I said earlier the kanji music can represent to cheating on our characters right means it works tsuki so as a result when we when we are writing music in a sentence instead of writing to hiragana characters we can punch in the kanji music and make that sentence shorter and remember kanji can represent more than one more than one more than two more than three hiragana characters it just depends on the kanji itself another very important reasons are homophones homophones are basically terms that sound the same there are pronounced the same way but are written differently but that's in English in English the way we distinguish two Homa phones is one number one context of the full sentence and to the spelling of that term for example the term hey and hey like the plant hey that horses eat those two are written differently because they're spelled differently instead of E and hey we use an A for the plant hey but for Japanese like I said earlier each character usually represents a consonant and a vowel and each character is one syllable that's why it makes it harder to spell the same word differently with hiragana and as a result a homophone for example um it which is candy and um it which is rain is literally just uh admit you know got our characters together and so in order to fix this problem what we do is we put the kanji on it for candy in a sentence instead of just the hiragana characters or we write to the kanji on it for rain in that sentence and by doing so we can identify what we're exactly talking about because the kanji is unique to that meaning now lastly I just want to briefly explain to you how you're going to learn these three writing systems number one you're not gonna in katakana you should memorize in at least a month or two months and like I said earlier they both follow the same syllabary they're both following the kana syllabary except they're just written differently so you have to memorize them individually what I usually recommend is to memorize a whole column usually in one week so for example are you will you memorize that column and you go for the next column next column next one by a month you'll be able to memorize he Rana and same with katakana you memorize each column in one week and write the characters on a piece of paper peated Lee and you can memorize that way and now as for kanji there are thousands and thousands of kanji characters so I'm not saying you have to memorize all of them in fact I believe it is impossible to memorize all of them but what you can do is try to memorize 2,000 now it sounds a lot and it is a lot but the reason why I say 2,000 kanji is because there is something called joy yoga kanji and what it basically is it's the 2,000 most important country that you need to know in order to write the Japanese so as long as you know your joy your kanji you should be fine so by the end of your Japanese studies you try to memorize 2,000 in fact the jlpt and one will take up to 2,000 kanji so make sure you keep that in mind and trying to memorize kanji on a daily basis so that's all for today's lesson about hiragana katakana and kanji but for more of my lessons especially on kanji which I'll teach later on or maybe after this lesson so in order to catch up to those make sure to LIKE subscribe and comment if you have any question and also if you want to participate in any of my other platforms for example this scored or amino just make sure to check my YouTube's profile and you can go find the links on the top right of my page so until then Metheny