Quote:
Originally Posted by steven
OK, I apologize. I misinterpreted what you said. In that case, it would fall under "hiragana". In the case of hiragana, though, you only see certain "small" kana.
As far as I know, you only see っ (small tsu), ゃ, ゅ, and ょ. Sometimes you'll see things like ぁ, but that would be for things like わぁ～, which isn't exactly a word, persay.
"じぉうし", as far as I know, should probably be written as "じょうし”.
This is an area where hiragana and katakana differ. With katakana, you'll often see a lot of "small" kana that you'd normally not see in hiragana. (Sometimes you'll see "katakana words" written in hiragana. In fact, old video games do this a lot.
Here are some examples of using small katakana in situations where you wouldn't usually do it with hiragana.
ジェット
ジェスチャー
チェキ
パーティー
スティーブン/スティーヴン (notice the "ten ten" on the ウ, which would be unusual for hiragana)
トゥーズデー (as opposed to チューズデー)
Incidentally, although it may be different from what is "normal" you sometimes see English words "transcribed" into katakana with the use of "small" kana.
フレンド This would indicate to the reader that you shouldn't pronounce the vowel end of the ド. I imagine that most people aren't famliar with that though. I've also seen it done with a small ッ written at the end of the kana (this might actually be less uncommon).
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oh! すみません！！ I meant to write じょうし I just misspelled it. Yeah you're right though about the smalls in Katakana, and you explained it well. It's like because Japanese language does not have a
"v" sound or an
"f" or a
"w" sound other than
"wa" so there are characters like
ヴァ ヴィ ヴゥ ヴェ ヴォ and
ファ フィ フゥ フェ フォ that are only in Katakana to make foreign words. Which in Hiragana there is only
ふ/fu.
And I also want to make a point that Katakana is sometimes used for Hiragana words but I didn't explain it really in my first post because I was mainly talking about it's basic use. I've seen people mix up Hiragana and Katakana in a normal Japanese sentence just to make it look cool. I've seen song titles that have Japanese names but it is written in Katakana just to make it look nice. It's hard to explain the exact little situations where Katakana replaces Hiragana and I think it's just something people have to learn on their own. Like I did. So we just have to expose ourselves to Japanese writing a lot to be able to understand it.