Hi!! Thank you for opening your inbox to our questions! I saw in your post on names that there are 3 different types of letters - Hiragana, katakana, kanji. How do you keep them all straight? For the name Ai you said there are so many different spellings, isn't that hard to understand? Do you ever come across a common word that is spelled in a way you don't understand or do you learn to understand it all early in life? Sorry if the answer is obvious XD Thanks!
Well, the English alphabet has 26 different letters and spelling/pronunciation is a mess because the rules all contradict each other and everything has about a million of irregular forms or exceptions. How do you understand it? You grew up with it, you learned how to read and write in English during your sensitive period for language acquisition. It’s the same thing.
Hiragana and Katakana are the first things we learn in writing. They’re both actually the same letters, just written in a different way. Even foreigners who have just started learning Japanese can probably tell them apart at a glance because they are really distinct from each other.
Check this out! Hiragana is on the top, Katakana is on the bottom. The romaji pronunciation for each letter is written underneath in the English alphabet. Look at how they coincide with each set of letters.
Another important thing to note about Japanese is that spelling isn’t a thing. Unlike English, our language is written phonetically. So take a look at the hiragana chart there; if you know how to read each letter, you can read basic words written in hiragana even if you don’t know what it means.
Kanji is what makes learning Japanese difficult. They look a little more like this, and this is just a handful of kanji.
There are thousands of Kanji in the Japanese language. We spend a lot of time in school learning new ones every year, and they get more and more difficult. Each kanji has a meaning, and a way it’s read. They often have multiple meanings and multiple ways it’s read as well.
We’re taught about a little over two thousand or so Kanji in school, and that’s generally considered to be enough for adult literacy. There are a lot of kanji that the average Japanese adult doesn’t know how to read, and it’s okay. As long as you know what’s used most often in day-to-day life, you’re good. Anything beyond that is just impressive.
We also have a certification program for kanji, where you take an exam to gain certification for a certain level of kanji proficiency if you’d like. The higher levels are extremely difficult to pass, and require years of dedicated study and practice to achieve.
With kanji, there are parts and meanings that you learn. So even if you don’t know how to read a kanji, it’s possible to glean the general meaning of the word and what it’s trying to say.
As for names… Most names are written similarly. Like in America, chances are you know a Kaitlyn, a Caitlin, a Caitlyn, a Katelin, a Catelyn… There are a ton of different ways to write it, but you generally know that it’s the same name. It’s similar to that, we recognize common names, and we know how to read Kanji so we can recognize it.
A recent trend in naming has been kira-kira names, which are names written with ateji. Ateji is just picking some kanji that you like, and assigning a way for it to be read. So for example, this kanji 桜 is read as Sakura. In theory, I could name my kid Ren, but have it written as 桜, even if that’s not how the kanji is read. This is actually a bad example, it’s not how its usually done, but that’s the idea behind ateji. Oftentimes what people will do is select a few kanji they like the meaning of and pick a name to be associated with it. Or they take the pronunciation of kanji that normally wouldn’t be put together, and use the pronunciation to create a word or a name.
It’s a cultural standard for all names to have furigana, smaller text written next to kanji that has the pronunciation of the word so you know how to read it. In most forms and contracts, you write your name the way it’s supposed to be written, and there’s a tiny section above it to write your name in hiragana or katakana to make the pronunciation clear.
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