Writing Japanese is hard. I know you're thinking. Duh, Josh, it's Japan! When they go in, they
go ALL IN! But it's worse than you think. It's ridiculously, ridiculously hard!
Growing up, I was a language nut. Look at me, making this video, guess I still am. Through
the years, I spent time learning this script and these scripts and these ones... some time
learning this... and even more with... alright, you get it.
And then I went for Japanese. See, in the US there's this flu that goes around. It's
called Japanophilia. Catch it and you're off reading manga, watching anime and eating the
kind of sushi with the fish that's on the top like *slurp*. I was committed though.
I headed for the library and straight to the Japanese books. This was back when the new
library was being built, so they were holding books hostage in this dingy place with no
a/c. The books are all shuffled around down on these low shelves. You know the ones that
are below your knee level all on the ground? So I do my ninja bend and I scan the resources.
Fluffy book about Japanese Is For Everybody? Pass. Easy Japanese In 5 Seconds a Day? Pass.
Cartoon-cat-yay-by-the-way-you'll-learn-some-Japanese-I-promise? Double pass! But then, there it was: the biggest,
the heaviest, the densest textbook in the entire section. Modern Japanese Book I: Grammar
Lessons. It called my name. It said, "Ikimashou!"
So I rush home, I bust open the book and it hits me with... syllables. My first thoughts
are, well, the optimist in me comes out and says, "Oh, these look so fun and Japanesey!"
But guess what the pessimist in me said? "That’s like 76 more symbols than I want to memorize!"
Yeah, the pessimist inside me is an oni who's a fast counter.
The optimist won out. And for good reason. It was actually less of a hassle than it looked
like at first. Just 46 characters in total, on account of some of the syllables turned
out to be duplicates with two little voicing slashies added to their heads. Even better,
I was told this is technically all I needed to know to write every Japanese sound. That’s
all the syllables the language has, thanks to Japanese being all neat and orderly in
the way it lays out syllables.
And that’s great! Until I found out that the friendly syllables are lies. Like when
the t+i syllable is actually chi and then the t+u syllable is tsu. Or when this, this
and this actually sound like that and that and that. The more I read, the more Japanese
was saying, “But wait! there’s more!” More compound syllables, more double consonants,
more historical syllables they were hiding from me and just forgot to mention. Asterisk
mark all over the place.
But hey, historical spelling and complicated workarounds. I come from English, baby, and
that's how we write! Plus I just did a whole rant about Tibetan, so I can handle some clunky
syllables. Besides, compared to how Japanese syllables used to be written, it's all super
regular. So that's a relief.
Without giving me time to breathe, they tell me that for each one of these syllables, I’m
actually going to have to learn two characters. Yes, Japanese has two syllabaries! The one
I spent hours sweating over was HIRAGANA. These are the same syllables written in KATAKANA.
So... are hiragana and katakana for writing different sounds? Nope. The syllabaries don’t
do anything different. Then when do I use this one or that one? Oh, just keep in mind
that they're used for different syllables in different contexts. Japanese is very context
sensitive after all. Smile!
But none of that’s what made Japanese tough. It's when they introduce yet another
mixed-in script that things start getting serious. I mean, seriously serious.
Roll the clocks back to the day Japan learned to write. They learned it from China. And
learning to write from China meant memorizing thousands of characters just to read the basics.
Yeah, well, unlike other places that learned their penmanship skills from that formidable
cultural powerhouse that was the Middle Kingdom, Japan held onto its long master list of Chinese
characters. Oh, they held onto it real tight! They’re called KANJI, and they’re the
backbone of Japanese. Even those syllabaries I was learning came from simplified versions
of some of these characters.
At first they passed this kanji stuff off as a third native system. You know, you got
your hiragana, your katakana, your kanji! And instead of different characters for different
syllables, these are just different characters for different words. You know, like you learn
to say new vocabulary when you’re learning other languages, with kanji you get to learn
to draw your new vocabulary, too! So exciting.
That's when I learned about a dictionary with more than 50,000 characters to play with!
That's a lot of characters... I think it was maybe more of a mind game to make me okay
with what came next. "Don't worry!", I was told. You could do alright with basic Japanese
if you just learned a couple thousand characters. *Cough* Oh, oh, just a couple thousand?!?
I guess I was supposed to say, "Oh, 50,000's a lot! In that case, 2000 should be a walk
in the zen garden!" Are you not supposed to walk in those? A comb through the zen garden
maybe?? They even downgraded me again, telling me I could pat myself on the back for just
mastering the "basics" if I made it through the first 1006 characters.
A thousand and six. Yeah, this was slow. It was time consuming. Uh, they started me with
the simple real-world examples like trees, suns and moons. And they looked off but if
you squint your eyes you could see it. But it was more trickery. After a couple hundred,
it started to be really clear that most kanji aren’t drawings of the words I was learning
at all. No way! It took me a while, but I figured out what was going on.
They’re like playing charades with somebody who has a very specific word in mind but refuses
to give you any good hints, and the clues you do get are like way out of date. Like,
“One word. Something to do with trees. Ok. Sounds like... oar!” Got it? Nobody? Nobody?
Oh, I’m sorry, the answer was “table”. See, the thing you missed was that “oar”
sounds like “board”, which is an old word for table. Obviously...
Most kanji are this kind of strange combination of a sounds-like piece with a something-to-do-with
piece. Except that the sounds-like might not sound like the thing it’s supposed to sound
like, and the something-to-do-with can have absolutely nothing logically to do with what
the character means.
It's no good waving these complexities aside by saying that, well, it's a lot to learn,
but at least you're fundamentally just learning a character for each basic word. For one,
a single character might mean a bunch of different things when it combos with other characters.
It can even mean a bunch of different things on its own. Even worse for beginners though,
there's more than one way to pronounce almost every single one of these characters. Japanese
is very context sensitive, after all. Wink, smile.
And that's the problem with kanji: they aren’t just kanji. They’re a bunch of problems
all mixed together. It’s the most bizarrely complicated writing system within a system
ever devised by humankind! And next time I'll show you exactly what it was about kanji that
really pushed me over the edge.
I like having you here spending some time with me thinking about the world's toughest
writing system. Stick around and subscribe for language.