Georgia-based computing professional Drew Jarred Carrington serves as an end-user support technician for Atlanta Information Management. Holding a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in computer science, Drew Jarred Carrington minored in Japanese and maintains an interest in Japanese literature and language.
The Japanese language employs three different alphabets: kanji, hiragana, and katakana. Both katakana and hiragana comprise 47 characters that represent particular sounds.
Hiragana is the standard form of writing in Japanese and is usually the first alphabet that Japanese children learn. Hiragana is used in conjunction with kanji to form sentences, but can be used on its own since writing hiragana is easier. Most words in hiragana are Japanese in origin.
Katakana, on the other hand, is used predominantly to represent foreign words that have been translated into Japanese. In Japanese, katakana also shows emphasis, similar to italics and other stylized writing in English.
The reading of each character in both hiragana and katakana remains the same since they are phonetic. Reading in kanji varies because kanji characters represent abstract concepts, names, or words that change in the context of the words around them. When kanji appears with hiragana, the hiragana indicates how the kanji symbol should be pronounced.
