Getting started and need Help

3 comments

1. All 3 are required for japanese, start with hiragana, then katakana..and finally kanji. Katakana is the less common of the 3 as it’s used for words that are not originally of japanese origin (among other things)…you use a combination of the 3 syllabaries to create a sentence..a single word can have both kanji and hiragana

   Technically if you only care about speaking, you don’t have to learn kanji, but I would highly recommend you do as kanji is an integral part of the language, just take it at your own pace.

   I personally didn’t use many books or apps to learn so I’ll leave that part to someone else, but a good place to start is the startup guide on this sub…good luck 🙂

2. This is why I feel it’s weird to present Japanese as having “three alphabets” because it’s not as if you can choose which to use.

3. hiragana and katakana are pretty simple to learn and take only hours to learn

   kanji is a totally different thing and is way more complicated and probably takes years to really learn well

   it’s way, way, way, way worse than “2000 letter sounds” or whatever you currently think it is. It’s more than 2000 characters, and each one can typically sound multiple ways, the way it sounds depends on the word it is found in. And words sometimes use kanji in ways that make sense and sometimes in ways that seemingly feel arbitrary.

   Basically kanji is not even on a comparable scale to kana.

   Anyway you can definitely learn it if you try hard, but I’m just telling you it’s a big problem to tackle.