Learning Japanese Characters

Friday, 12 Oct 07, 8.33am at home

Morning morning morning diary..

I found out something interesting about learning chinese characters or, Japanese call it Kanji. As you can see from the pictures, seems that every word has story behind it. Perhaps this is how the ancient chinese created their own language. When I think of it, I imagine a group of pithecanthropus erectus gather in a big cave with some candles in it, they are discussing symbols that they all can understand. Once finished, the leader will draw the symbols on a stone while others copying it on their own stone-notebook. If I imagine how these symbols were created, it's a very touching story, isn't it? But when I imagine how I did so badly in my Kanji Quiz yesterday, "uhuk..!". Maybe at that time, they drew direct symbols, they drew eye exactly like eye, they drew river exactly like river, they drew door exactly like door. But now, they have simplified the characters, I know it's to make us easier to write but the symbols are no longer too clear to guess. *So you prefer to go back to the stone-era?*

Japanese language is even more difficult! How can one chinese character have different sound depending on the context? One simple example: this word 人 (means: person) can sound as 'hito', 'nin', or 'jin'. And there are 2 other types of Japanese characters. They just mix these 3 types of characters in sentences. Now it's our job to remember (or to guess) which words use Kanji, which words use Hiragana, and which words use Katakana. They now adopt more and more words from English, these are written in Katakana. You know, for a beginner like me, I have a hard time reading the characters. Once I manage to read it, I have another hard time to guess whether it's originally a Japanese word or adopted from English. Some words are very hard to guess, like:
- Duraibu = Drive
- Sutato = Start
- Tosuto = Toast
- Saisu = Size
- Taipu = Type
- Doburu Rumu = Double Room
After I spell it, then I can roughly guess. Now what I can do is to wait for them to adopt all words from English then Ai kan supiku Jepenisu furuenri, retsu jasu hopu, tuenti yurusu Ai wiru waitu (I can speak Japanese fluently, let's just hope, twenty years I will wait).

-Abbie-