• Veloxization
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    fedilink
    54 months ago

    You’re correct! Katakana is indeed used to write loan words. There are of course other use cases like names of animal species (e.g. you can write 狐 or キツネ for fox, and 兎 or ウサギ for rabbit) but generally that’s where you see them.

    And yes, kanji was used prior to kana and the earlier versions of kana looked a lot more like kanji, but just got simplified as time went on.

    Oh, and the word you were looking for is “radicals” for the components. c:

    • The Stoned Hacker
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      fedilink
      34 months ago

      Thanks, all of that was stuff I had learned years ago and forgot. Thanks for helping jog my memory!