An Irish man in need of help.

[Dioza]

I'm not sure if i have the right section as this is my first post on the forum. I had a quick read through and couldn't find the answer to my question.

So, I'm 21, from Ireland and I've always been fascinated with Japan since i was a child. I'm planning on visiting some day and decided since I'm currently unemployed i could use the time to learn Japanese. I have the Rosetta Stone program, not sure if many of you are familiar with it.

I have a choice to see the writing in "Romaji", "Hiragana & Katakana", "Kanji/Furigana" or "Kanji"

I have only spent about 2 hours learning so far and my preferred method is with Romaji because i can sound out the word as i read it. But i would like to learn it the most effective way, if i learn Japanese using Romaji and most signs/menus/street names are in Kanji or Hiragana i will then have to go back and relearn it again. But my question is, which is more widely used? Also, if i was to order from a menu or read street names in Japan, which script would be written?

Any help much appreciated.

 

[Glenn]

In larger cities there'll be romaji underneath the kanji/kana. There may also be some romaji on business names and other stuff like that, but for the day-to-day stuff you need the other three.

They all have their own uses: katakana is for foreign names and emphasis, mainly, and is similar to italics in English. Hiragana are used for native Japanese words and grammatical functions, like verb and adjective endings/conjugations and particles. Kanji are used to write the vast majority of words, but they're a bit different than katakana and hiragana, in that they aren't exclusively phonological. Furigana is usually hiragana that's added on top of (but sometimes to the bottom of) kanji in horizontal script, and usually to the right of kanji in vertical script to show the reading.

It depends as to what script something is written in, as I wrote above, but also some words don't have kanji assigned to them or they are extremely rare, and sometimes things are written in hiragana just for stylistic purposes.

See the Japanese writing system Wikipedia page for more detailed info.