I'm somewhat confused as to how this all works.
I know there's Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana. And I'm assuming you need to know all these in order to read semi fluently.
Someone told me that all the words in the Japanese language have their own specific symbol for writing, and that in order to write in Japanese, you need to memorize somewhere between 50-100,000 characters? Is this true?
The reason why I say this is because I just got my textbook for the Japanese college course I'm taking and it has a list of sounds (There's a list of Hiragana sounds and a list of Katakana sounds...)
It seems like the entire book is written with these two systems. (If there's an example section with the sentence "I am not a student.", it is written with the hiragana symbols wa+ta+shi wa ga+ku+se+i )
any reason why they're not in Katakana? I guess the main question is when do you use the different types of script?
(I'm sorry, I really know nothing about the Japanese writing system so I'm sorry if I come off extremely stupid. )
I know there's Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana. And I'm assuming you need to know all these in order to read semi fluently.
Someone told me that all the words in the Japanese language have their own specific symbol for writing, and that in order to write in Japanese, you need to memorize somewhere between 50-100,000 characters? Is this true?
The reason why I say this is because I just got my textbook for the Japanese college course I'm taking and it has a list of sounds (There's a list of Hiragana sounds and a list of Katakana sounds...)
It seems like the entire book is written with these two systems. (If there's an example section with the sentence "I am not a student.", it is written with the hiragana symbols wa+ta+shi wa ga+ku+se+i )
any reason why they're not in Katakana? I guess the main question is when do you use the different types of script?
(I'm sorry, I really know nothing about the Japanese writing system so I'm sorry if I come off extremely stupid. )