Thank you all so much for your help. So just so I have a understanding is Hirigana and katakana like their alphabet or just how they things when they talk?
Japanese has a limited number of possible sounds, the only language I think with fewer possible sounds is Korean, but don't quote me on this.
Each "kana" or character in hiragana or katakana represents ONE sound that can be made in japanese, chained together these of course make words.
Hiragana is a sort of "short-hand" cursive for more complicated Kanji, Kanji are ideographs borrowed from the Chinese language, since Japan did not have a written language at the time... An ideograph is, in basic terms, is a visual representation of something, some physical thing, or idea (hence ideograph) not unlike hyroplyphs, which are different but.... in the old days the kanji 窶愿ｺ, for sun, used to look more or less like a sun, with a dot in the middle... Or perhaps that was a moon... that's not important... in any case, these things looked more or less like what they represented, and gradually became more stylized.
Hiragana was a means of letting lay-people write, (males generally wrote entirely in kanji, while women wrote in hiragana)... Hiragana is like short-hand kanji, reducing the number of strokes in kanji from several, to only a few.
Katakana on the other hand which is used mostly to represent foreign words, and words used for emphasis, is a particular part of (a/some/it doesn't mattter really which for laymans purposes) kanji, taken from it, and used in and of itself as a new character to represent one sound.
ed: Read this:
I need help Identifying a Kanji character thread, concerning the correct terminology of ideograph versus logograph... you probably can just as well skip it, as it more concerns semi-advanced linguistics.
thanks, Glenn
