Trying to read something written only in hiragana is kind of like tryingtoreadEnglishsentenceswrittenlikethis.
Suddenly, it’s a lot more difficult to tell where one idea stops and another starts, since it’s all one unbroken string of hiragana. Without the mix of kanji and hiragana, those breaks would be a lot harder to spot. 見た: "mi–" (the verb “see”) and "-ta" (marking the verb as past tense).車を: "kuruma" (the car) and "wo" (the object marker).私は: "Watashi" (I) and "ha" (the subject marker).Right away, we can see the pattern of kanji-hiragana-kanji-hiragana-kanji-hiragana, which quickly tells us we have three basic ideas in the sentence. This sounds like it would have the potential to turn every sentence into a confusing mass of congealed language bits, but written Japanese tends to fall into patterns where kanji and hiragana alternate, with the kanji forming base vocabulary and the hiragana giving them grammatical context.įor example, here’s "Watashi ha kuruma wo mita," or “I saw the car,” written with the customary mix of kanji and hiragana. Japanese writing doesn’t put spaces, at all, between different words.Sure you could write "koutai" in hiragana as こうたい, but "koutai" can mean “replacement,” “antibody,” or “retreat.” Because of that, if you want to get your point across, you’re much better off using kanji, 交代, 抗体, or 後退, to clarify which "koutai" you’re writing about. Because of this, the Japanese language is filled with words that are pronounced the same but have different meanings.Īs a matter of fact, there are so many homonyms that without kanji, it can be confusing to tell which one is being written about. Aside from famously having no L, very few consonants can be blended together, and every syllable has to end in a vowel or N. Still, if everyone in Japan did it, eventually the childish stigma of using only hiragana would fade away, just like if humanity collectively decides that, starting tomorrow, chocolate milk is a perfectly acceptable beverage to serve/request at formal business meetings.īut Japanese has a very limited number of sounds.Sure, you could write "kuruma" as くるま and be understood, but it’ll look childish to Japanese readers, so adults are expected to go with 車.
#Chinese word for cure in conji full#
If you wanted to change that to the past tense, "mita"/saw, you’d leave the kanji as is and replace the る with the hiragana た (ta) to get 見た/"mita," which means “saw.”īut wait, if anything that can be written in kanji can also be written in hiragana, why not use only hiragana? After all, while the complete set of 46 hiragana is bigger than the 26-letter English alphabet, it’s still way more manageable than the 2,000 or so regular-use kanji, the collected group that serves as the litmus test for full adult Japanese literacy.Īctually, there are three pretty solid arguments against writing exclusively in hiragana.īecause kanji were developed before hiragana, writing with kanji generally imparts a more educated and mature feeling. So when writing a verb, you use a kanji for the base concept, then hiragana to alter the pronunciation and add more meaning, such as the tense.įor instance, the verb "miru," meaning “see,” is written 見る, combining the kanji 見 (read mi) with the hiragana る (ru).
Remember, each kanji represents a concept. So why do sentences have a mixture of kanji and hiragana? Because hiragana gets used for grammatical particles and modifiers. "Kuruma," which we saw written in kanji as 車, can also be written in hiragana as くるま, with those three hiragana correlating to the sounds ku, ru, and ma. They just represent sounds.īecause of this, any Japanese word that can be written in kanji can also be written in hiragana. In other words, hiragana characters function like English letters, in that they don’t have any intrinsic meaning. They take fewer strokes to write than all but the simplest kanji, and instead of representing concepts, hiragana are used for writing phonetically. Hiragana, though, are much simpler in both form and function. For example, "kuruma," the Japanese word for “car,” is written in kanji as 車. There’s actually a fairly logical, slightly lengthy explanation for using all three, so pour yourself a cup of green tea and let’s dive right in.įirst, let’s take a look at kanji, which are complex characters, originally coming from Chinese, that represent a concept. The reason for this triple threat to language learners’ sanity isn’t that teachers of Japanese want to lessen their workload by convincing you to study Spanish instead. That first rendering of “Tokyo” is in kanji, with the hiragana version next, and the katakana one at the bottom. Japanese has three completely separate sets of characters, called kanji, hiragana, and katakana, that are used in reading and writing.
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