Why are there 3 ways of writing in Japanese?


Why are there kanji, hiragana and katakana? Is there a logical reason behind
this or just tradition?




That's a good question, I used to wonder about that myself! This is what I've
found out through my own experiences:

When the Chinese brought their written language to Japan, there were only
Kanji (Literally, Chinese Characters). Unfortunately, although this kind of
ideographic writing system works perfectly for the Chinese language, the
Japanese language is structured differently. For example, in Chinese, if you
want to say something in the past tense, all you do is add the word for "past"
to the verb (it would be the equivalent if every verb in English could be put
in the past tense solely by adding '-ed' to the end of it {fall-ed, go-ed}),
and in Japanese (as in English) the actual word changes.

What the Japanese needed was a way to notate their verb changes. They
developed Hiragana and Katakana from already existing Kanji and assigned them
solely phonetic meanings. At some point Katakana came to be used for (among
other things*) foreign loan-words, but you can still see examples of Japanese
words written in Katakana (for example, on old gravestones) and loan-words
written in Hiragana (for example, you can see たばこ for tobacco).

*See link in comments below




That's a good question, I used to wonder about that myself! This is what I've
found out through my own experiences:

When the Chinese brought their written language to Japan, there were only
Kanji (Literally, Chinese Characters). Unfortunately, although this kind of
ideographic writing system works perfectly for the Chinese language, the
Japanese language is structured differently. For example, in Chinese, if you
want to say something in the past tense, all you do is add the word for "past"
to the verb (it would be the equivalent if every verb in English could be put
in the past tense solely by adding '-ed' to the end of it {fall-ed, go-ed}),
and in Japanese (as in English) the actual word changes.

What the Japanese needed was a way to notate their verb changes. They
developed Hiragana and Katakana from already existing Kanji and assigned them
solely phonetic meanings. At some point Katakana came to be used for (among
other things*) foreign loan-words, but you can still see examples of Japanese
words written in Katakana (for example, on old gravestones) and loan-words
written in Hiragana (for example, you can see たばこ for tobacco).

*See link in comments below

