I don’t speak japanese nor I’m learning it, but I was thinking about how kanji, katakana, hiragana, and many others are basically “symbols” for words or ideas.
So, taking that in mind, we change to another topic real quick. When someone is writing in a latin or cyrillic alphabet they “spell out” the syllables. For example, when writing Wednesday, some people wouldn’t just be like oh yes Wednesday while they write, they’ll think something more like “wed-nes-day”.
Now, hopefully you get what I’m about to ask. A japanese person, or someone who speaks and writes japanese, spell out the symbols? Or does it work differently? Because I know that (especially in kanji) when you have one symbol it can mean something and be pronounced in a way, but when you have other symbols that can change.
Hopefully I made myself clear, thanks for your help.
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So, one thing is that unlike an alphabet, hiragana and katakana can only be pronounced one way in regular words, so saying the word is already spelling it. You can say it more slowly if people are writing it down. If it’s hard for them to understand which syllable it is for some reason (like no and mo sound similar) then you can do the same as alphabets do with “A as in Argentina” – eg. “No as in Nougyou”.
For Kanji, you can say it in the context of another word. For example the kanji for “shoku” is also in the word “taberu” for eating. So if you needed to correct someone on a kanji you can say like “taberu no shoku” (the shoku kanji in taberu). But, tbh this happens relatively rarely outside of names. In regular words, people would just know from context which kanji should be used. It’s more like with names that you have to be careful and might have to say which one. You can also talk about the left and right parts of a kanji. So in two common ways to write the name Yuko “祐子” and “裕子”, notice how the right part of the first kanji is different. So while you could say the same kanji in a different word, you could also say “with right side ‘right’” or “with right side ‘valley’” etc.
You can use hiragana to write out kanji but you have to know the context because some kanji have different sounds
Hiragana and Katakana are like alphabets. す is su, し is shi, so すし is sushi. Each of them have only one pronunciation (though there are exceptions but we won’t talk about that for now). So when we write hiragana or katakana, yes we do “spell it out” in our head.
Kanji on the other hand is like emoji. Instead of using “water” you can just write 💧and read it “water”. But then when you’re writing the 💧symbol, you don’t spell out anything in your head. It’s kinda like that. When I write the kanji 水 (“mizu” = water), I say “mizu” in my head, but I don’t think that counts as spelling it out. If I write “mizu” in hiragana (like this: みず), I spell out みmi and ずzu in my head.
Hiragana and katakana are syllabaries and each character corresponds to a syllable. Therefore, the answer for those is ‘Yes, words can be spelled out when hiragana words and katakana words are written.’ Fir example, for the word ‘sushi’ which has two syllables すし. There are some spelling rules and long vowels, etc, but they are just spelling conventions.
However, kanji stands mainly for ideas that the sounds of a word are not spelled out in a lot of cases. The word for ‘fall/autumn’ is ‘a- ki’ and in kanji written as 秋, one kanji. The kanji stands for the meaning of ‘fall’. Some kanji has two, or more ways of readings/sounds because there is a Japanese word for a concept, and at the same time there is another way of reading the same kanji which mostly comes from ancient, quasi Chinese way of reading the same character. For example the kanji for ‘fall/autumn’ is read as ‘Shuu’ in some words because the word originally came from a dialect of Chinese. Sometimes the Japanese ways of reading kanji are very different from today’s Chinese. First of all, Japanese speakers do not distinguish tones.
When it is difficult to read kanji, hiragana and katakana are used to show how to read them because they are more ‘phonetic’ than kanji.