I am familiar with the [history of why these two writing systems were
invented](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/4281/why-was-both-
katakana-and-hiragana-created), and my question comes more from a modern
practical standpoint.

In my understanding, hiragana and katakana both have same sounds, they are
just written differently. Katakana is for foreign words and onomatopoeia, and
hiragana for everything else.

So I'm just curious why weren't these two systems merged into one to make it
easier to learn to write in Japanese?
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katakana orthography hiragana
Why were hiragana and katakana never merged into one system?
“What’s up with upper case and lower case? We have two different forms for
each letter, sometimes similar, sometimes completely different. Why weren’t
these merged to make it easier to learn to write?”

Not poking fun at all—rather, recasting your post to point out that we English
speakers deal with two different glyph forms for a single letter every single
time we read or write—and we don’t blink an eye at that. So when learning
hiragana and katakana, hearken back to your childhood days of learning the
alphabet, and learning two different forms for each letter.

It’s really not that different.

* * *

And, come to think of it, some letters have more than just two glyph
forms—consider alternative lower-case forms of **A** , such as the book form
**a** with the loopy bit on top, or the usually handwritten form **ɑ** without
the top. Or for **G** , such as the book form
![](https://i.stack.imgur.com/dmzhW.png) with a closed loop for the bottom,
and the handwritten form **ɡ** with the bottom as just a hook. Come to think
of it, kana are actually a bit simpler—while there are more letters in total,
each letter only has the two forms (hiragana and katakana), at least in modern
usage.

_(For those interested in multiple historical variants for each kana, see also
the["Hentaigana" article on
Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hentaigana), and [this PDF from
Unicode.org listing different hentaigana
forms](https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1B000.pdf).)_
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Eiríkr Útlendi's answer covers one key aspect of why the systems weren't
merged (it's just a quirk of writing systems). But there's another answer
that's actually already in your question itself: Hiragana and Katakana serve
different grammatical functions in writing. If they were merged, Japanese
writing would lose that method to distinguish loan words and onomatopoeia from
other words.

Whether the gains of this grammatical function outweighs the cost of having to
learn a whole second set of characters is subjective, but I'd argue that it's
only marginally more difficult to learn Katakana in addition to Hiragana
(especially once you compare it to the time cost of learning Kanji).
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The distinction between Katakana and Hiragana helps with reading. Not because
you can distinguish loan words from other words, but rather because you can
easier break the sentence apart.

Usually, the parts of a Japanese sentence written in Hiragana are particles,
modal verbs, inflectional endings, etc., which usually follow parts written in
Kanji or Katakana. So every time the system switches back to Kanji/Katakana,
there is usually a semantic break.

To illustrate this: While

> すもももももももものうち

seems unparsable, adding katakana and kanji breaks it up nicely:

> スモモも 桃も 桃のうち

(Spaces mark the switch back to kanji/katakana)

While most originally Japanese words have kanji, most (Western) foreign words
don't, but especially for foreign words readers may need some aid to detect
the word boundaries. it also helps differentiating function words from the
names. In

> カインがアベルを殺害した

we can see clearly that there are two names, and が and を are not part of them.
(There are better examples)

Since learning additional <50 chars on top of the >2000 (essential) kanji is
not too big a burden, the benefits outweigh the costs.

Well, most of this could also be achieved with spaces...
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