Question:
language.
Is it common to use Hiragana/Katakana if one doesn't know the proper kanji needed in a sentence?
Is Kanji strictly for writing?
Last question:
Do most people write japanese in their own way? An example (sort of) would be someone using kanji in a sentence, where someone else would use hiragana/katakana - someone writes a sentence and used the kanji for Japan, and someone else used hiragana/katakana for Japan.
Answer:
Japanese script consists of Katakana, Hiragana and Kanji.
Katakana is commonly used to write foreign words in Japanese.
Foreign names/surnames, and loan words are usually in Katakana.
Typical paragraphs consist of hiragana and Kanji.
If you don't know the kanji for a word, you should look it up on a dictionary. But if you still have no idea, it is ok to write in hiragana, but it is not advisable to do it all the time.
If you write all the words in hiragana, it would be very hard to read and to know the true meaning of the word. A kanji character is a symbol of something and it's meaning is related to the word.
For example:
The word 'Hi' could be written in different kinds of kanji.
日 this Hi stands for day
火 this one stands for fire
It is easier to understand a word's meaning by looking at the kanji characters.
Most children who don't know the kanji of a word would write in hiragana. But adults in particular are expected to know kanji.
There are thousands of kanji characters, and not all japanese people can read and write all of them.
They have an examination that you can take to test what the level of your knowledge towards kanji is. It is called Kanji kentei.
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