Hi, I’m wondering if both katakana and hiragana need to be learnt. From what I’ve heard, hiragana is the main Japanese writing alphabet while katakana is for more foreign words. For kanji and learning about words etc. does anyone have way to learn it or is it just mostly textbooks for everything?
Yes both hiragana and katakana need to be learned, and you can use Renshuu to learn kanji and vocabulary, you can use textbooks but there are way more options
It's not only for "foreign words", but rather loan words, which are words that are now FULLY Japanese, but the original of the word is another language. For example, in English, we use the same alphabet, so even though we have tons of loan words, we still use abcs for all of them. If you ask for a "taco", no one thinks you are speaking Spanish - you are using an English word that refers to a Spanish food.
In Japanese, though, taco is タコス, and like カレー (curry) and ラーメン (ramen), these are all Japanese words, just with foreign origins.
It's not even a question. They're 100% essential. You need to know them both.
There's no way to progress in learning Japanese without knowing them and how they sound. They're fundamentally the sounds of Japanese, which in the Western concept is an alphabet. Japanese fundamentally is the sounds of hiragana/katakana, even if you're inclined to not use kanji at time (but TBH, that would be harder, not smarter).
It's not just used for spelling things, but there's multiple uses. For hiragana in particular, often it is used with different types of grammar, including usage as a conjugation marker. All of that is most essential for communication, not just scripts for spelling with pretty swirls and simple straight lines that is in contrast to the harsh, complex strokes of kanji. Some of them are used to mean something or has a function, like the way kanji is used at times to mean something, or different things.
You can learn a lot of the fundamentals in Renshuu, some other similar apps and textbooks. But most of them use the JLPT format, which in itself isn't essentially everything, but it gets you by. Dictionaries, when you also learn how to use them, help tremendously to answer certain questions. Grammar books are essentially encyclopedias/dictionaries all the same. How you learn is up to you. The key thing here is to keep learning and practice. A lot!
