Why Japanese（日本語) omni-sucks
I want to describe to you, as succinctly as possible, the challenges of learning to read/write in Japanese.
Japanese uses 4 written languages. All 4 regularly appear, not only within the same page, or on the same package, but within sentences and even words. Here's an example; 書きます. In "romaji" (Japanese in roman characters, one of the 4 languages) this word is "kakimasu". It means "to write" or "writing". Let's say you went to the trouble of learning how to read/write the 3 easiest languages (romaji, katakana, and hiragana), even if you knew the word kakimasu, and those 3 languages, that word above would still look like gibberish. You could read the "...kimasu", but without knowing the kanji character, you're s.o.l. (which makes it a pain to try to learn by reading). Another mixed word you might want to know is アメリカ人. "Amerikajin" or American (person) in English. Kakimasu uses kanji and hiragana, amerikajin uses katakana and kanji. You will also see hiragana after all the languages as Japanese "particles" are written in hiragana.
AshbyストリートとCaliforniaストリートの近くに私のアパートがあります。This is a single sentence using all 4 written languages. I should also mention Japanese don't space their words out, ashardasitmightseemtounderstandinEnglish,itisevenharderinJapanese. At least they've recently come to somewhat accept periods, quotation marks, parenthesis, etc. Sentence translated; "My apartment is near Ashby St. and California St.
Those two little sets of Japanese above are hiragana and katakana (well, most of them. Most kana charts leave out a lot more, but this one is still missing new adoptions like "va").
Just stand back in awe of the numerous methods of redundancy. How many ways can
one express “ji” in just hiragana and katakana? It doesn’t necessarily mean
anything, it’s just a sound.
ジ ヂ じ ぢ all are “ji”. Of course if you toss in kanji, the sky’s the limit, but a common “ji” is 時 and that is a reference to time, it’s used like “o’clock” in English, ex. 5 o’clock = 五時。It only gets more confusing from here, not only is Japanese redundant with characters within the same language, or across language, in kanji each new character for the same sound is a different word. We have nothing like that in English. In English for example “win” and “wind” are two entirely unrelated words that simply have ‘win’ in common. In Japanese, there may be 100 different ways of expressing the same sound, but unless you could read them all, you wouldn’t know they all sounded the same. It gets even crazier.
Since kanji was taken from Chinese it wasn’t a perfect transfer, and it has been applied in two major ways. One of the ways of importation took the meaning of Chinese characters, and used Japanese sounds, for example 今日。It is pronounced “kyou” however those characters aren’t pronounced kyou. The characters mean kyou (today). If you were to pronounce them in their native form, or separately in Japanese, they would be entirely different. In Japanese 今 alone is pronounced “ima” it means “now”. 日 is pronounced "nichi",“hi” or sometimes “bi” it means “day”. So “now” + “day” = “today” however it isn’t pronounced 'imanichi',‘imahi’ or ‘imabi’, it’s ‘kyou’ (the ‘u’ isn’t pronounced u, but reflects the extension of the pronunciation of the ‘o’, which doesn’t exist in English).
The other method of kanji into Japanese uses kanji solely by pronunciation, and not by meaning, which is the opposite. And of course it gets even more complicated with further pronunciation variations on the same kanji for different words, and different methods of kanji introduction. The icing on this insanity cake is that even the Chinese gave up on these characters and have since simplified them. The Japanese masochistically have held on to the 6,000+ kanji (the total number is unknown). Imagine that. Having one of your 4 written languages so complicated you will die never learning all of the characters (if even most).
ジ ヂ じ ぢ all are “ji”. Of course if you toss in kanji, the sky’s the limit, but a common “ji” is 時 and that is a reference to time, it’s used like “o’clock” in English, ex. 5 o’clock = 五時。It only gets more confusing from here, not only is Japanese redundant with characters within the same language, or across language, in kanji each new character for the same sound is a different word. We have nothing like that in English. In English for example “win” and “wind” are two entirely unrelated words that simply have ‘win’ in common. In Japanese, there may be 100 different ways of expressing the same sound, but unless you could read them all, you wouldn’t know they all sounded the same. It gets even crazier.
Since kanji was taken from Chinese it wasn’t a perfect transfer, and it has been applied in two major ways. One of the ways of importation took the meaning of Chinese characters, and used Japanese sounds, for example 今日。It is pronounced “kyou” however those characters aren’t pronounced kyou. The characters mean kyou (today). If you were to pronounce them in their native form, or separately in Japanese, they would be entirely different. In Japanese 今 alone is pronounced “ima” it means “now”. 日 is pronounced "nichi",“hi” or sometimes “bi” it means “day”. So “now” + “day” = “today” however it isn’t pronounced 'imanichi',‘imahi’ or ‘imabi’, it’s ‘kyou’ (the ‘u’ isn’t pronounced u, but reflects the extension of the pronunciation of the ‘o’, which doesn’t exist in English).
The other method of kanji into Japanese uses kanji solely by pronunciation, and not by meaning, which is the opposite. And of course it gets even more complicated with further pronunciation variations on the same kanji for different words, and different methods of kanji introduction. The icing on this insanity cake is that even the Chinese gave up on these characters and have since simplified them. The Japanese masochistically have held on to the 6,000+ kanji (the total number is unknown). Imagine that. Having one of your 4 written languages so complicated you will die never learning all of the characters (if even most).
And yet, I’ve accepted all of this. I know the 3 easy
ones. I’m learning more about kanji as I learn new words. What really annoys me, and what inspired me to write all this, is that the
Japanese take their own fluency for granted, and commercially they constantly
screw around with their characters. It’s hard enough keeping 10 googol
characters in my brain. But the Japanese aren’t happy with that. As soon as I
became fluent in the kanas I realized I had only just begun my uphill struggle.
In Japan, on their labels, in their ads, etc. They frequently use highly
stylized characters. This is madness!!!
While I earlier pointed out all the redundancy in
characters for the same sounds, this goes to the similarity and repetition of
Japanese characters. One of the hardest in Japanese is “shi, so, tsu, no, and n.”
in katakana. シソツノン。Just look at that shit. Here, I’ll put
them in another order to show you how hard they are to distinguish.
シツノソン。You must be dry shaving me bro. For YEARS I’ve had to stare at packages, sentences, etc. and think, “Uuuuuhhhhh was shi with the down to up, or the up to down? Was no with one stroke or 2?” AHHHHHHH. Even now after teaching myself katakana 5 years ago, and re learning it several times since, I still get tripped up. But of course there’s more crap like this. Mi and mu, very similar (when writing them at least): みむ. Ru and ro: るろ (toss in ra ら and hu/fu ふ which utilize similar strokes). Wa, nu, ne, me, re:わぬねめれ. It just goes on and on like this. So you have ra, ru, and ro all swoopy and then you have so そ which is like ru and ro on top, and the reverse of ra, ru, and ro on the bottom.
シツノソン。You must be dry shaving me bro. For YEARS I’ve had to stare at packages, sentences, etc. and think, “Uuuuuhhhhh was shi with the down to up, or the up to down? Was no with one stroke or 2?” AHHHHHHH. Even now after teaching myself katakana 5 years ago, and re learning it several times since, I still get tripped up. But of course there’s more crap like this. Mi and mu, very similar (when writing them at least): みむ. Ru and ro: るろ (toss in ra ら and hu/fu ふ which utilize similar strokes). Wa, nu, ne, me, re:わぬねめれ. It just goes on and on like this. So you have ra, ru, and ro all swoopy and then you have so そ which is like ru and ro on top, and the reverse of ra, ru, and ro on the bottom.
And here’s where it all began.
I was at Berkeley Bowl and saw a package of yakisoba.
Notice the katakana “so” in white, ソ
it isn’t too stylized, they did it without a curve, it looks more like an
English Y, but at least I could stand there and think about which of the シソツノン was top down and with two strokes. So I read “so-su” katakana
is used mostly for foreign words incorporated into Japanese, in this case it is
“source”. Then there was this bullshit...
Bonus examples:
フリクリ ”FuriKuri" or as it's advertised "Fooly Cooly" I loved this show back in the day. I drove to mo-f-ing Tustin CA just to pick up The Pillows furikuri vol. 2. I had to translate these boxy stylized characters by looking up fu, ri, ku, ri, and retroactively realizing those 4 boxes were the characters.
Here's another fine example of suicide inducing stylization. The first line appears to have the kanji for day, and for "sei" which is like the study of something, like a gakusei (student) or sensei (teacher), then Ka-bii" using two stars in the ビ。
Here's my best reading of that bottom line, which is entirely in kana (presumably I should be able to read) urutora su-pa- (means super, yay got a word!) derakkusu or maybe deraffusu aasu? iisu? (I looked it up, the urutora is "ultra", so I got that, but the last part is still unreadable, and really, I shouldn't have to spend 15 minutes breaking this down).
From reading the description on the website I got this from, that title is "famitsu" or ファミツ. I suppose if I went character by character looking at them side by side, I would eventually get fami, but I don't know if what's at the end is kanji, or some kind of alien cartoon.
Of course we stylize our words in English too. Hardly ever, and never to the extent Japanese do, but in English, there's only 26 letters. That's it. Done. Not hundreds, not thousands. And our letters don't all look the same, except capital "i"s and lower case "l"s in shitty sans serif fonts.
Here's a tough one as far as English goes. But even when you see nigh on gibberish English, it's never in standard commercial products like noodles. And English, in all its forms follows basic formation rules. Combine that with there being only 26 characters, and no matter how stylized, it can be easily read because for the most part all 26 look different from each other, and have tell-tale characteristics.
