I wouldn’t say you rarely encounter written hiragana. It’s in practically every sentence because, as you mentioned, it carries the grammar of a sentence. Particles, conjugations, auxiliary verbs are all written with hiragana.
As one of my Chinese friends in grad school put it: he could kind of understand written Japanese but had no idea what was going on with “those weird characters everywhere.”
As one of my Chinese friends in grad school put it: he could kind of understand written Japanese but had no idea what was going on with “those weird characters everywhere.”
Lol true. I read the 死 character in a bunch of weird symbols and suddenly the entire message looks so omnious as if its a threat.
They all look familar, as in, it doesn’t look foreign to me, because they are almost all just Chinese, except the weird “@” looking symbol. But unfortunate I never made it past 2nd grade before emigrating so I don’t know how to pronounce the names lol. I know the positions like 天皇, but idk how to pronounce the names of the actual people because they contain characters I never learned.
Then there’s some parts looking like this:
I have no idea what most of it is, looks very strange and “foreign” to me, except those few blocky characters that are chinese… I mean, I can make out what it roughtly says based on those few chinese characters: Japan Country … east… location … country … area … population… island nation … 4 island … 6th in the world … economy … [etc…]; like I can read a few characters every so often, everything else, those characters that are curvy and round looks “broken” to me. Like lol when I was a kid, I saw those “broken” characters amd I thought there was a glitch/bug in the electronic device (was messing around with settings and language menu).
This is exactly what my friend would say! Wikipedia is a genius example to use. That upper section is mostly nouns, not complete sentences, so it’s just kanji that are mostly readable to people to understand Traditional Chinese characters. The の character is a grammatical particle (written in hiragana) indicating that 最大 is modifying 都市, to give largest city.
And then all the “curvy” characters in the body of the text are the hiragana carrying the grammar of the sentence. You can understand the nouns and verbs since they’re written in kanji, but the grammar surrounding them is in hiragana. That’s why I thought it was odd for the other person to say you rarely encounter written hiragana. You really can’t write a complete sentence or much more than a single word without it.
I wouldn’t say you rarely encounter written hiragana. It’s in practically every sentence because, as you mentioned, it carries the grammar of a sentence. Particles, conjugations, auxiliary verbs are all written with hiragana.
As one of my Chinese friends in grad school put it: he could kind of understand written Japanese but had no idea what was going on with “those weird characters everywhere.”
Lol true. I read the 死 character in a bunch of weird symbols and suddenly the entire message looks so omnious as if its a threat.
Surprisingly, I looked up "Japan"s wikipedia in Japanese, and some parts are quite readable to me like this:
They all look familar, as in, it doesn’t look foreign to me, because they are almost all just Chinese, except the weird “@” looking symbol. But unfortunate I never made it past 2nd grade before emigrating so I don’t know how to pronounce the names lol. I know the positions like 天皇, but idk how to pronounce the names of the actual people because they contain characters I never learned.
Then there’s some parts looking like this:
I have no idea what most of it is, looks very strange and “foreign” to me, except those few blocky characters that are chinese… I mean, I can make out what it roughtly says based on those few chinese characters: Japan Country … east… location … country … area … population… island nation … 4 island … 6th in the world … economy … [etc…]; like I can read a few characters every so often, everything else, those characters that are curvy and round looks “broken” to me. Like lol when I was a kid, I saw those “broken” characters amd I thought there was a glitch/bug in the electronic device (was messing around with settings and language menu).
This is exactly what my friend would say! Wikipedia is a genius example to use. That upper section is mostly nouns, not complete sentences, so it’s just kanji that are mostly readable to people to understand Traditional Chinese characters. The の character is a grammatical particle (written in hiragana) indicating that 最大 is modifying 都市, to give largest city.
And then all the “curvy” characters in the body of the text are the hiragana carrying the grammar of the sentence. You can understand the nouns and verbs since they’re written in kanji, but the grammar surrounding them is in hiragana. That’s why I thought it was odd for the other person to say you rarely encounter written hiragana. You really can’t write a complete sentence or much more than a single word without it.