First of all, the phonetic notation of Chinese characters in Japanese is Hiragana. To some extent, Hiragana is equivalent to Pinyin in Chinese. But we use Chinese characters completely in Chinese. Because Japanese is developed from a part of Chinese, that is, incomplete quotation, many Japanese we see today are composed of Japanese characters and Hiragana.

For example, the word "ask, ask, ask" is a combination of Japanese characters and hiragana.

Katakana is mainly used to write loanwords, onomatopoeias, names, places and technical terms, or to express emphasis. To put it simply, loanwords are words introduced from the west or Europe and the United States that Japan did not have originally, and their pronunciations also evolved from those of other countries. Loanwords are mostly expressed in katakana.

For example, "ァィスクリーム: ice cream" and "ァメリカ: America".

Hiragana is the most common language tool in Japanese life. However, in recent years, among young people in Japan, there has been a trend of replacing Hiragana with Katakana, which is both an important and difficult point in Japanese learning, so we must make great efforts to learn Katakana. Generally speaking, which word in Japanese is hiragana and which word is katakana is fixed, as long as you pay attention to accumulation.

Extended data:

Katakana is mainly used in the following situations:

1. Loanwords: proper nouns such as foreigners' names (except Japanese), foreign place names (except Japan) and all loanwords (except Japanese).

2. Onomatopoeia: mimetic language. For example, the dog barks: ワンワン, the cat barks :ニヤーニヤー, the frog barks :ケロケ𞥇𞥇𞥇𞥇𞥇1252525

3. Japanese names of organisms and minerals (the Japanese government suggests that the scientific names of animals and plants be expressed in katakana, but personal usage habits do not stipulate it)

4. Formula documents before World War II (in Chinese characters)

5.8 months ago cable 1988. In a computer system that does not support double bytes (using half-width katakana)

6. When emphasizing a word in writing (which can be Chinese characters or words originally written in Hiragana).

Hiragana is mainly used to represent the vocabulary and grammatical auxiliary words inherent in Japanese, and Hiragana is also commonly used in phonetic notation of Japanese Chinese characters, which is called vibrating kana.

References:

Baidu Encyclopedia-Katakana

Baidu Encyclopedia-Hiragana