When exactly do you use Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji ?

[mythos]

Hi there. I have a general query. I am currently trying to pick up Japanese. As i have read, there are three kinds of letters in Japanese which are mentioned as above and i believe that all three are used together in a sentence. However, i am still quite puzzled as to how do you know when to use hiragana or katakana? Is there a fix way to use them ?

As of now, what i am doing is recognizing and memorizing the charactors before proceeding to grammar and sentences. I hope someone is kind enough to explain to me regarding my query above. Thanks in advance.

 

[PaulTB]

Hi there. I have a general query. I am currently trying to pick up Japanese. As i have read, there are three kinds of letters in Japanese which are mentioned as above and i believe that all three are used together in a sentence. However, i am still quite puzzled as to how do you know when to use hiragana or katakana? Is there a fix way to use them ?

Quick version.

Kanji & hiragana for most stuff. Hiragana is used for the ends of verbs, 'true' adjectives, particles and words which just aren't written with kanji (often / at all).
Katakana for words that came from English and such like foreign languages.

 

[Glenn]

See also this message of mine about how kanji work.

 

[nemesae]

hiragana for grammatical structures, such as verb and adjective conjugations, particles, about anything except for foreign words and nouns, verb stems, adjective stems and so. Hiragana are also often used instead of kanji, I think it's to show a different meaning, making it become a grammatical structure too, but I'm not sure. Standard expressions are often done with only hiragana as well. But hiragana and katakana are sometimes also used without any logic at all.