Why are there kanji, hiragana and katakana? Is there a logical reason behind this or just tradition?
Answer
That's a good question, I used to wonder about that myself! This is what I've found out through my own experiences:
When the Chinese brought their written language to Japan, there were only Kanji (Literally, Chinese Characters). Unfortunately, although this kind of ideographic writing system works perfectly for the Chinese language, the Japanese language is structured differently. For example, in Chinese, if you want to say something in the past tense, all you do is add the word for "past" to the verb (it would be the equivalent if every verb in English could be put in the past tense solely by adding '-ed' to the end of it {fall-ed, go-ed}), and in Japanese (as in English) the actual word changes.
What the Japanese needed was a way to notate their verb changes. They developed Hiragana and Katakana from already existing Kanji and assigned them solely phonetic meanings. At some point Katakana came to be used for (among other things*) foreign loan-words, but you can still see examples of Japanese words written in Katakana (for example, on old gravestones) and loan-words written in Hiragana (for example, you can see たばこ for tobacco).
*See link in comments below
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