Do I have to know an alphabet to pass my language exam?

This reminds me of a guy in several of the Japanese classes I took in college. He kept trying to convince the professor that he should be exempt from taking exams because he was president of the anime club and was already basically fluent because he watches so much anime. Everyone including the professor thought he was joking at first lol

The dude could barely make it through one sentence when we would have to read in class

I would get it the other way around, skipping to the test and not taking classes
- I loved the Japanese classes I took, but the classroom portions were very low key, and if someone was struggling the professors would basically hold their hand through it. The exams on the other hand were brutal lol
- That's what I did. Except it was physics, not Japanese.
"Ok, here's the test, if you score 90%, you pass, otherwise shut up".
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k_LDXa3lPk

Oh boy, it's gonna be rough when he learns that you need another ~2.000 kanji to be fluent. Although only ~100 for JLPT 5.

For context, there are only 46 hiragana and 46 katakana.

Japanese is whacky.. Like why not just pick one alphabet instead of using 3 different ones? Are they stupid?
- I had to はし (hashi) over the はし because I forgot my はし at home.
  Same word phonetically, three meanings. With Kanji it's easy.
- We also use two different alphabets. Lower case and upper case. Upper case is basically Latin script optimised for stone carving, lower case was developed for ink writing (I think in the Carolingian era). Now we use both at the same time without batting an eye.
  Add cursive in the mix and we also have 78 letters instead of 26.
- As a Japanese learner, katakana is a godsend. It's like reading a scientific paper in English and having all the Latin in italics, as an indicator that "don't worry this is a foreign word, you're not an idiot for not recognizing it." Especially because most katakana words are derived from English (or words you'd recognize as an English speaker) so it's just a matter of saying it over and over until the pieces click into place. Example: オーストラリア = Oosutoraria = Oh-s-t-rah-ree-uh = Australia.
  Also outside of picture books for young children, Japanese doesn't use spaces and has way fewer sounds than most languages which results in a LOT of homonyms and similar words that all blends together (see other comment YouTube link). So having three writing systems in one really helps convey meaning and makes reading much faster.
- Nah, it makes sense. You can write everything with just hiragana if you want to, in theory.
  Katakana denote words from different languages, which I found really helpful when learning the language. It's probably easier for fluent people too. There are a lot of these words.
  Kanji are a lot more compact and make text a lot more readable. Japanese does not use any whitespaces so it can be tricky to separate words when using only hiragana. Instead you mostly have some kanji separated by hiragana. Some Kanji only denote a single hiragana, but usually they represent a group of them therefore saving on space too. Like other languages they have words with multiple meanings, but they have different kanji, further improving readability.
  Take this with a small grain of salt, I'm by no means fluent myself, but I've been learning for quite some time.
- Why doesn't English fix its spelling?"
- Because this is what Japanese would look like of they didn't use kanji.
- To be fair we have two alphabets upper case and lower case. The hiragana and katakana are basically the same. One to one equivalency between them. The kanji does add a lot of complexity.
- No it adds variety to the look of writing, each character is a syllable not a single sound (mostly) so they use fewer characters for per syllable, having two syllabary systems means that there's more visual distinctness per word. I'm not a Japanese speaker so don't take my word for it, but no they're very much not stupid it's a clever system and one that's related to the history and culture of Japan.
- Modern Japanese is a chimera of native words, Chinese, Pali, and various European languages. Kanji are used to write the Chinese loanwords, hiregana for the indigenous stuff, and katakana and Romaji for the European loanwords (sort of). You could write everything in hiregana, or even in katakana or Romaji with some effort, but doing it this way is easier.
- I know it's a rhetorical question, but It's a result of the popularization of ideograms during the spread of writing technology in their region, as opposed to the representation of concepts through only patterns of a small set of character seen in Europe which later spread to the far west. They're far from the only culture to make the choice.

I'm just going to pretend I know what all of this means and move on.

Basically asking if they are learning English and is great at the first half of the alphabet, do they really need to learn the second half?
And then there's Kanji, which is the arguably more important and the most difficult thing in Japanese, which isn't even mentioned in the post (you starting to learn that in more advanced class, which I doubt they even reached it yet)
- Might wanna mention that the character set is a bit larger with Japanese. I don't know how much larger, but Chinese boasts something like 2000+ characters.
Dude wtf you're all over this site, are you John Lemmy or something?
Anyways, Japanese uses different writing systems – the first two that people usually learn (Kana) are basically just symbols for syllables (also called "mora"), Hiragana and Katakana. They use a different set of "letters" which represent the same sounds (you'll find a "ka", "m/n", "fu", "o", etc. in both, but they look different). There's also Kanji, which is an umbrella term for the various usages of characters which were adapted from Chinese, this includes Kana but generally people don't mean to include Kana when they say "Kanji". One Kanji can have MANY meanings and pronunciations, due to many multiple ways in which the character was adapted from Chinese, so the writing is extremely contextual. You can generally "spell out" a Kanji with Hiragana or Katakana, often times this is used when learning new Kanji or to disambiguate meaning. It's also one of the ways you use to type Japanese on a device/keyboard (the characters can be converted to a Kanji using software where you can pick based on a list of most common Kanji which are pronounced the way you typed).
Since Japanese doesn't use spaces or dots or anything usually, you'll often see all three mixed together in order to separate different words, although in modern times Katakana has especially been used for borrowings from foreign languages.
There's also Rōmaji, which is a term for the various romanization/latinization systems for Japanese. This one is also commonly used to type Japanese text.
The JLPT is the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, you take it to get a certificate stating your Japanese language abilities and the results are ranked from N5 being the lowest (correlates to _{A1-A2 CEFR, slightly more than beginner knowledge) to N1 being the highest (}B2-C2 CEFR, high level of abilities in the language)
The "alphabet" is generally the easiest part of learning a language, and an obviously important part, so the person being unwilling to put the time into it means he probably isn't serious enough about learning the language to actually follow it through.
Apologies if my explanation is off, I don't speak Japanese.

In order to pass my english exam, should I learn uppercase? Or just lowercase is OK?

Also, wtf is a looped cursive?

When I started learning Japanese our teachers gave us the kana on two sheets of paper and said "you'll learn these by Monday". I had never seen Japanese before and it was quite a challenge, but do-able. I still know them decades later, even though I never was fluent and haven't practiced since uni.

Haha I was studying katakana on the flight over. Katakana is typically used for English words, so you can understand a lot of text with only knowledge of a basic alphabet and not knowing any actual Japanese.

Coca-Cola was the first katakana I learned.
コカコーラ for the uninitiated. (Ko ka ko (dash means elongated vowel here) la.)
- That's awesome! I saw it printed on a t-shirt soon after arriving in Japan, and a few days later recognized it on a cafe menu and ordered it for the kids.
  So, it's among the first things I learned too.

バカ

I mean, reading just three lines of anything in Japanese would give you the answer to this.

The answer is no, unless you strictly limit yourself to manga title pages.

Do keep in mind that some widely accepted words that were imported from foreign languages would remain in Katakana, even if it's been there for centuries.
One example would be "ramen".
- and some native japanese words get katakana-ised too!
  e.g. バカ, most animal names, etc.