this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2024
207 points (96.4% liked)

Animemes

1578 readers
93 users here now

Memes related to anime. Animemes.

Rules
  1. Don't be a shithead.
  2. Posts must be a meme with anime or related to anime or weeb culture.
  3. Use NSFW tag for lewd/ecchi. No explicit hentai.
  4. Nothing illegal, copyrighted, etc
  5. Repost only if the last post is 6 months old.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

Both kinda, they have different scripts because they have so many homophones. Japanese has far fewer phonemes (possible sounds) compared to english, this combined with the fact that you usually can't have two consonants together without a vowel in between makes it so the amount of possible words is very limited. Because of this if you used just the "phonetic" script hiragana ( each character represents a sound) then it would get confusing since かみ that represents the sound "kami" would be confusing as to what you're referring to. So they mix in kanji, Chinese characters where a character represents a thing, to distinguish these homophones.