Hi everyone,
I started learning Japanese a few weeks ago , I now know hiragana and a bit of katakana.
I was watching some anime to see what I could read and there was barely any of these two alphabets ,are all the other characters kanji or is it something else?
2 comments
Nouns and verb/adjective stems are generally kanji. Conjugations and other parts of grammar are generally hiragana. Katakana is used the least and is generally reserved for foreign words, slang, or implication.
Unless it’s addressed to a child or to everyone **including** children, most things in writing are in kanji, the Chinese characters in use in written Japanese. Hiragana is mostly used for grammar, and katakana is most often used for words that are not of Japanese or Chinese origin.
This effectively means that without sufficient kanji knowledge, someone will be considered not completely literate, if not completely illiterate. Elementary school graduates are expected to know 1,026, and middle school graduates are expected to know 2,136. But this is just for “official” writing like legal documents and newspapers. Creative writing, including manga, novels and even video games are allowed to use even more than that. If you wanted to read those, you’d be more comfortable being familiar with 3,000 to 4,000.