Japanese (日本語) Is, Uh, Interesting!

Konichiwa (こんにちは)!

I was reading information about Japanese tonight. It's more complicated then I originally thought. Here is what About.com said:

"Kanji represents blocks of meaning and hiragana expresses the grammatical relationship between them. Katakana is used for foreign names, the names of foreign places and words of foreign origin. Confused?..."

No. I'm not confused. I also found out some interesting facts about Kanji (漢字). I'll just summarize what I've learned here, instead of quoting more articles. I read that most kids' books are written in Hiragana only and that if necessary you can write whole sentences in Hiragana.

After World War 2 Japan made a document listing about 2,000 Chinese characters that they would use in Japan for their writing. About.com says that 50,000 Kanji symbols exist but that only 5,000 to 10,000 are for everyday use. Each symbol in Kanji holds a different meaning. So Japanese kids have to spend a lot of time in School learning a certain amount by high school. It sounds like even the Japanese have a hard time learning Kanji!

I had a lot of fun learning Korean/Hangul and I caught on pretty quickly. I would still like to learn Korean but I'm not sure what all is in Korean and what I would do there for a career. Either way, I would love to visit South Korea sometime and would still have to know some of the language so it wasn't a waste of time for me.

I've always found Japan interesting because of their Technology industry, and it's important to know some of the local language so I think that I'll end up learning some Japanese too.

The Korean singer Se7en knows 4 languages (at least), Korean, Japanese, Chinese (a.k.a. Mandarin?), and English. I know because I've read that in articles, heard it in his songs, and seen it in his interviews. Here's a picture of Se7en if you were wondering what he looked like:

Here is one of his Japanese singles: Hikari (光) which is Japanese for Light. I don't know what a "good" Japanese singer is, but I think it sounds fine. Maybe a Native Japanese speaker can tell me if it's "good" or not. Either way, click on the link in the song name above and you can listen and download it.

ZB24 ;-)