漢字

After all that ‘easy’ katakana stuff comes the real Challenge – Kanji. At first glance Kanji , Chinese characters, seem like a tough pill to swallow. They are actually not too terribly hard to learn…except there are more than 2000 in daily use…so good luck with that.

Most people just see a bunch of scribbles when they look at Kanji, but the characters are made up of some basic building blocks (basically the more difficult Kanji are made up of several simply kanji called radicals). You can even use these radicals to look up unknown kanji in the dictionary. I think this was done in an ancient time before you could write the kanji in a denshi jisho or just hold your cell phone over the character for a translation. So once you get familiar with the simpler building blocks, you can pick up new words really quickly. Then once you learn these words, you can combine them to make new words.
For example, ィ can represent a person, 木 stands for tree. Put them together, you got a man leaning on a tree,　you get 休, vacation.
女 (woman) + crown = 安, easy. I didn’t say they all made perfect sense. Take that word easy and combine it with fun (楽) and death (死) and you get euthanasia (安楽死). Tell me with a straight face that doesn’t make sense.

Okay, in case all of those half-assed examples aren’t helping, do you at least see how the building blocks help? Instead of looking at the Kanji and seeing a bunch of lines, you only have to see 2 to 5 radicals in a specific order. So when you think about it, you don’t really have to memorize 2000 kanji, just 200 radicals and how to arrange them.

Japanese have problems with Kanji too, so don’t feel terrible about knowing a measly 100 or so Kanji. With the rising popularity of computers and keitai, many Japanese are forgetting how to write these characters out. Kind of like the need to spell correctly flies out the window once you discover spell check.

If you've learned nothing else remember this kanji, 外国人, because no matter how many kanji you know, this is all you'll be.