Maximizing ROI in Japanese literacy

To become literate in English requires learning only 26 letters, but Japanese involves considerably more work.

To begin with one has to learn two phonetic alphabets, Hiragana and Katakana, each with 52 characters. Then there’s Kanji, the simplified (somewhat) Chinese pictograms where each character represent a word, an idea or a sound. Educated adults should know at least 3,000 of these general characters along with those used for specific areas of life.

To make things even more complicated for foreigners all three alphabets are used together, sometimes in the same sentence even the same word.

Learned by children in a prescribed schedule over years of schooling, Kanji for non-Japanese adults involves a significant investment of time and effort. So what would be the best way of spending this time to learn kanji ?

An approach I’ve been trying is to focus on the most common words and thereby get the most return for the time invested. As an example take the character

山

pronounced Yama, meaning “mountain” and derived from an abstraction of three mountain peaks seen at a distance. Yama is a very common word and one that’s relatively easy to read and write. Another ubiquitous character is

中

pronounced Chu or Naka, meaning “middle” from a representation of an arrow piercing the middle of a rectangular target.

Combining these two characters together makes the word:

中山

pronounced Nakayama, meaning “middle of the mountain”.

Considering Japan’s mountainous topography, learning this word allows you to now write the family name of millions of Japanese in all walks of life and thousands of places across the country.

You’ll note that I’ve not only found common pictograms but also ones that are relatively easy to write. Drawing and memorizing thousands of kanji unfortunately involves some very difficult characters that, though simpler than their Chinese counterparts, are far more complex than the Latin alphabet. For those interested in software development, this complexity in representing Japanese characters on screen necessitates the use of Double Byte Character Sets, allocating twice the space needed for each letter in the Latin alphabet.

All three of these alphabets are undoubtedly artistic and practicing them can be a rewarding art form in itself. This book besides showing beautiful calligraphy done by the author also discusses the aesthetics of the characters and their connection to Chinese painting.

Modern designers like Katsuichi Ito have taken the characters and shaped them to their needs creating interesting logos and representations from the letters.

Kanji itself has many historical and cultural dimensions as well representing the ideas and world views of East Asia over the last several millennia. Interestingly the composition of some of the words have been changed in recent history due to their cultural or racist connotations.