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Japanese has three alphabets (and the English alphabet... and those Arabic numbers we are all familiar with)
Given those and the English letters at your fingertips they have a lot of tools to give context. Grab a newspaper or Manga sometime, even if you don't know the words you can tell each writing system apart pretty easily.
Huh,
I lived there for three years and only learned about, Kanji, Katakana and Romanji.
Is Hiragana a more classic version of the language or is it an evolution of Katakana, that it looks similar to?
Hiragana is the standard Japanese alphabet basically... But in everyday language, Hiragana is used to construct Kanji, so you would rarely encounter actual written Hiragana unless 1) in some commonly used terms and/or grammatical constructs, 2) someone is pointing out the pronunciation of a Kanji, or 3) in materials for younger audiences
Katagana is used for "borrowed words" from non-Asian languages like say ice cream. These words never have associated Kanjis to begin with, so that's why you see them more often
Edit: I correct myself, I was a bit too exaggerating... Hiragana isn't that rare, just less prominent than Katagana. But it is a bit strange if someone lives in Japan in a long time and never know they exist... They are the basic alphabet after all
I wouldn't say you rarely encounter written hiragana. It's in practically every sentence because, as you mentioned, it carries the grammar of a sentence. Particles, conjugations, auxiliary verbs are all written with hiragana.
As one of my Chinese friends in grad school put it: he could kind of understand written Japanese but had no idea what was going on with "those weird characters everywhere."
Lol true. I read the 死 character in a bunch of weird symbols and suddenly the entire message looks so omnious as if its a threat.
Surprisingly, I looked up "Japan"s wikipedia in Japanese, and some parts are quite readable to me like this:
They all look familar, as in, it doesn't look foreign to me, because they are almost all just Chinese, except the weird "@" looking symbol. But unfortunate I never made it past 2nd grade before emigrating so I don't know how to pronounce the names lol. I know the positions like 天皇, but idk how to pronounce the names of the actual people because they contain characters I never learned.
Then there's some parts looking like this:
I have no idea what most of it is, looks very strange and "foreign" to me, except those few blocky characters that are chinese... I mean, I can make out what it roughtly says based on those few chinese characters: Japan Country ... east... location ... country ... area ... population... island nation ... 4 island ... 6th in the world ... economy ... [etc...]; like I can read a few characters every so often, everything else, those characters that are curvy and round looks "broken" to me. Like lol when I was a kid, I saw those "broken" characters amd I thought there was a glitch/bug in the electronic device (was messing around with settings and language menu).
This is exactly what my friend would say! Wikipedia is a genius example to use. That upper section is mostly nouns, not complete sentences, so it's just kanji that are mostly readable to people to understand Traditional Chinese characters. The の character is a grammatical particle (written in hiragana) indicating that 最大 is modifying 都市, to give largest city.
And then all the "curvy" characters in the body of the text are the hiragana carrying the grammar of the sentence. You can understand the nouns and verbs since they're written in kanji, but the grammar surrounding them is in hiragana. That's why I thought it was odd for the other person to say you rarely encounter written hiragana. You really can't write a complete sentence or much more than a single word without it.
"you would rarely encounter actual written Hiragana" is outright false. It is nearly impossible to write a full grammatically correct sentence in modern Japanese without the use of Hiragana, as Hiragana are used for subject and object markers, conjugation of verbs, question and assertion markers, possessives, adjectives, negation, and many many more grammatical constructs.
Source: read literally anything in Japanese, like an article from today's news https://news.web.nhk/newsweb/na/na-k10014946221000
I did deploy a lot, but I recall one of my first cultural lessons and they only mentioned the three.🤷🏾
I really appreciate you taking the time to share some of your knowledge.
Thank you!
Hiragana isn't very useful if you're not studying the language. The only thing a tourist or the like would need it for is the names of some food on menus like soba or something like that. It's much more important to know some basic kanji (like the difference between man and woman when you're using the bathroom in a restaurant) and then katakana because that's how they transliterate the foreign words.
However, if you do study Japanese you'd see hiragana on day one--it's a crucial part of the language.