Oh the joys of learning Japanese! First of all, learning all the syllabaries. The Japanese use romaji (the roman alphabet); katakana, which is only for foreign words, names, etc.; and hiragana, which is for normal Japanese writing. And then there is kanji. You know, the symbols and pictures. Kind of like Egyptian hieroglyphs, but Japanese people hate it when you compare kanji to hieroglyphs!
So, before you can even start to study the language, you have to learn hiragana and katakana! There are over 10,000 kanji characters, so it is ok to let them slide a little for the time being. It is actually surprising how many you pick up without realizing it!
Anyway, here is an example:
Kanji Hiragana Katakana Romaji
萩 はぎ ハギ Hagi
Believe it or not, these are all the same thing. Ok, so you don’t usually see Hagi in katakana, but you get what I mean.
Oh, and did I mention that every kanji has at least two ways of reading it. For example, 山 can be read as either ‘yama’ or ‘san’ and means either mountain or is an honorific. It all depends on the context. Except when it comes to Mt. Fuji, which is referred to as ‘Fuji-san’ instead of ‘Fuji-yama’ for various reasons.
Place names are kind of cool, though. My ken (state) is yamaguchi (山口), which translates as ‘mouth of the mountains’ because we live right by the sea, and are surrounded by mountains. Cool, huh?
Anyway, I’m sure this is riveting stuff for you guys, so I’ll leave it there.
じゃね！
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