I for some reason feel like I want to write about how interesting Japanese is. For those of you who don't know the Japanese written language has three parts, two alphabets called hiragana and katakana and kanji. Hiragana is used for Japanese words and conjugation, katakana is used for loan words and kanji are sort of the main chunk of the language. There are around 2000 kanji that are taught from elementary school to high school and there are more used in names and more complicated writings. Kanji is sort of a mess in a linguistic sense. Where in Chinese the kanji always have just one reading, in Japanese they can have many and you will always find extra readings that aren't in dictionaries. Kanji is difficult.
If kanji is so difficult then why does Japan still use it? There are several reason, despite having two alphabets the Japanese language doesn't have very much range in the available sounds. There are many words that have the exact same sound but very different meanings. People often think Kyoto and Tokyo are the same word but flipped when actuality it is 京都 Kyoto and 東京 Tokyo. The 京 kanji is the same but the other one is different. The difference is hard to hear but if you see the kanji you can understand it a lot more.
The same word can also have different kanji. This is a weird concept and makes it harder to study, but it allows for an extra level of depth not possible without it. I was watching Bleach today and saw a great example. The verb to protect is mamoru and is normally written as 守る but it can also be written as 護る. The kanji for the main character, Ichigo, is 一護(one and protect) not 苺 (strawberry). So in the show Ichigo is fighting himself in his mind and his other self says something like “The thing you want to protect isn't what I want to protect” but they used the 護る kanji instead of 守る. This seemed to have a second layer to the conversation because it was talking not just about protecting something but about Ichigo himself.
All of this would have been lost if I wasn't watching the show with Japanese subtitles on. Kanji gives Japanese so much flexibility and diversity in its writing, its just really interesting.
Ive decided to take the kanji test. This is the test Japanese people take to test their Japanese level. I am shooting for the same level as middle school students take, its going to be tough.
