So, I’ve seen Usagi being written in all of these 3 forms
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うさぎ
ウサギ
兎
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I get that some words can be written in hiragana or kanji depending on how much kanji you decide to write and what’s the more common ways of writing this word, but what confuses me more is why exactly sometimes usagi is written in katakana and sometimes in hiragana, isn’t katakana only for expressing sounds or writing foreign words? And if it’s a foreign word shouldn’t it always be written in katakana and vice versa?
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It’s probably a dumb question, but I’d really appreciate if you were nice with me, I’m still struggling to get to intermediate level
6 comments
Katakana is often used of species (both plants such as イチゴ and animal). It’s also used for onyomi in dictionaries. The might be more cases where katakana is used
Living things are customarily in カタカナ. This applies to creatures such as ゴリラ、パンダ and so on.
Welcome to all the confusing bits of language that you’re not going to find in a textbook! Or at least, not a beginner textbook, because then you get overloaded with how many exceptions to rules there actually are.
The big thing to realize for katakana is, it’s also used as a type of “stylish” writing. You learn that katakana is used for foreign and loan words… this is true, but you can also think of it being used the way cursive is used in English- except katakana is used far more extensively.
As for which is more common? I feel like katakana or hiragana would be. Keep in mind that young children and toddlers would be the ones learning animals the most, so it has to be kept in easy-to-write form. And then there’s the tendency of once you learn to write it one way, you stick with that way unless you’re absolutely forced to change it.
Basically, katakana is used to express animal names in a biological or academic manner.
When writing in hiragana, I think it is often used not to express something biological, but simply to talk about a soft and cute animal.
This is because katakana has a stronger impression than hiragana, and hiragana has a softer image than katakana.
In novels, names of animals might often be written in kanji.
This may be because novels look better when they are made difficult by using phrases and kanji that are not usually used on purpose lol
Incidentally, there are two kanji that represent rabbits: 兎 l and 卯.
The second one, 卯, appears in the twelve Chinese zodiac signs , 干支(えと)/十二支(じゅうにし).
Just so you know, 2023 is the year of 卯 🙂
In the corpus used at [JPDB](https://jpdb.io/vocabulary/1443970/%E3%82%A6%E3%82%B5%E3%82%AE), ウサギ appears in katakana 44% of the time, kanji 30%, and hiragana 24%.
(Numbers don’t quite add up to 100%, probably because of rounding.)
Animals are often written in katakana, especially in science and academics. Novels and such will mostly use kanji. If I had to guess I would say that katakana would be the most common form, but all 3 are pretty common and you can use all 3 without problems. in the end it depends who your audience is.