First look, at the picture above. Does it make sense? No, of course not! But regardless, this is what I have to deal with every day. TREASURE READING! DON'T TAKE LITERACY FOR GRANTED!
There are three different kinds of Japanese alphabets. First, Hiragana. あ い う え お. This is syllabaries, not letters, like in English. Each hiragana has it's own pronunciation and that is it. The above are "ah", "ee", "oo", "eh", "oh". This is the basic Japanese alphabet and the Japanese conjugate their words with these characters.
Next is called Katakana. ア イ ウ エ オ. This has the same principles of Hiragana, except now the characters are mostly straight lines instead of curvy. The Japanese use this for loan words, or words that came to Japanese recently. Usually, this is the best friend for any foreigner because if you can read katakana, you can usually figure out what that is. For example, ハンバーガー is pronounced"Hanbaagaa". Say it faster and faster and you'll realize eventually that it is "hamburger". A bit of a stretch, I know, but it works.
Next is kanji. That absolutely crazy mess. Kanji is Asian hieroglyphics, an entire word is compressed into the span of one word. Here are some examples 上 下 電 直. As you can see, they can get increasingly complicated. They mean, in order, "below" "above" "electricity" and "straight".
There are nearly 2000 kanji that the average high school graduate knows. To be specific, 1,945. Nearly 2,000 different patterns of lines that the Japanese use at whim to describe what they want. After months of living here, I know approximately 205. Ten percent and this is daunting.
To make matters worse, learning the individual kanji does nothing for you. You learn individual words, sure, but the Japanese combine them to get new readings and new meanings. The idioms are hard to figure out unless you're Japanese, and then it's really freakin' easy!
The average college graduate knows 4,000 kanji, and a kanji master knows 5,000 kanji. I have a long way to go.
