Ah no, you'll use hiragana and katakana in writing. I had a 'eureka!' moment when talking to a friend, when thinking out loud "but the same word can end different ways to mean different things. Taberu means to eat, Tabereru means Can eat, Tabeta means ate ... so they must use the kanji for the first part, then follow it with the hiragana to determine the meaning, right?" It's exactly that.
Also many conjunctions, sentence endings (like desu, da, kedo, ka etc etc) don't use kanji, they are only a syllable or two so you just use the hiragana. Katakana is used for foreign words, road signs, and for emphasis sometimes. Think of it as capital letters. It annoyed me too until I realised it had that usage, and we do exactly the same with the alphabet. Granted some folks want to phase it out in favour of pure hiragana, but I don't think that'll happen. I do think I prefer the alphabet overall for its versatility, but kanji/kana are also fun and cool in their own way.
If I learn a third, I think I'll go Chinese. Another hard one, but it's really commonly used and the kanji are about 50% the same as Japanese anyway so it won't be so hard after (the Taiwanese and Japanese people I've met here seem to consider Japanese "the easy language to learn", the same way we might consider French or German. It's funny to me). If I ever get to a fourth, Spanish probably. It's weird, before I started learning Japanese I straight-up wasn't interested in learning other languages. Now it's like I found a new hobby. I've been thinking lots about fantasy languages too since my eventual book will need to address the whole 'multuple languages' issue and beforehand I didn't have so much experience with it.
Also many conjunctions, sentence endings (like desu, da, kedo, ka etc etc) don't use kanji, they are only a syllable or two so you just use the hiragana. Katakana is used for foreign words, road signs, and for emphasis sometimes. Think of it as capital letters. It annoyed me too until I realised it had that usage, and we do exactly the same with the alphabet. Granted some folks want to phase it out in favour of pure hiragana, but I don't think that'll happen. I do think I prefer the alphabet overall for its versatility, but kanji/kana are also fun and cool in their own way.
If I learn a third, I think I'll go Chinese. Another hard one, but it's really commonly used and the kanji are about 50% the same as Japanese anyway so it won't be so hard after (the Taiwanese and Japanese people I've met here seem to consider Japanese "the easy language to learn", the same way we might consider French or German. It's funny to me). If I ever get to a fourth, Spanish probably. It's weird, before I started learning Japanese I straight-up wasn't interested in learning other languages. Now it's like I found a new hobby. I've been thinking lots about fantasy languages too since my eventual book will need to address the whole 'multuple languages' issue and beforehand I didn't have so much experience with it.
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Bra Wrote:People are dumb, essentially.