An interesting solution to the Kanji issue

I just recently purchased a Nintendo DS. It's a completely over-the-top Gameboy (It's the newest generation). I purchased it because it has a touch screen which allows you to "write" in the game. Why, would you ask, would I pick up a gameboy since I've only really had a passing interest in games anyway?

Well, the clever folks here, make Kanji games for the DS. You practice writing the idiographic Japanese characters on the screen and it tells you if you did it right or not... this sold me.

You see Japanese has 3 alphabets: one for domestic words (Like and, the, but, to and at), and one for imported words (Like Beer, Computer, Convininece Store), and then a third which is idiographic (Meaning each "Letter" represents a concept or idea, like Egyptian Heiroglyphics) which is used for proper verbs and nouns. Daily writing combines all three of these in a not-very-clean, often very confusing mannor. Japanese also has no spacing, so they are thrown together in a mish-mash of characters that ramble on worse than my blog posts.

The worst of these three alphabets is called "Kanji" and it was borrowed from the Chinese nearly 1000 years ago. Thus (And this is a nice side effect), the characters mean the same thing in both languages (so I'm also learning Chinese in a limited way).

The problem is that each "letter" represents an idea... and humans have a lot of ideas.... thus to have an alphabet in which each character represents an idea... well... needless to say there are 1,945 "letters" in this alphabet (You have a character that means "Sun", and "Moon" and "Son" and "Daughter" and "Bright" and "Dark"... etc)... to make matters worse, it's imported... so every one of those "Letters" has a Chinese reading (Or a close approximation) and a Japanese reading (The word that was used at the time to represent the same thing in the spoken Japanese language). Generally, when you see a character by itself, surrounded by Hiragana (The Domestic word alphabet), it is read the Japanese way... but if the same character is written next to another Kanji character, it is read in the Chinese way... of course, that's not always the case...

Thus, a word like the Verb "To Go" is pronounced "Ii", with the hiragana (The domestic alphabet) character "Ki" following it... which sounds like "Iki"... but the same character is used in the word for bank as the last character and in that case it is pronounced "Koh" (GinKoo). You just have to know that when it is in a sentance it means "To go" and when it's put with the other Kanji it means "Bank".... There is nothing anyone can do but buckle down and learn this... the hard way...

Here's the kicker: You have to know all 1,945 of these things, and all of their various readings (And some characters have more than one Japanese reading owning from having two dialects of Japanese get merged together) just to read the newspaper... or an instruction manual...

Needless to say it is a glum prospect to sit down and learn to read Kanji, knowing that it's going to be hours upon hours of practice before you can even read a childrens' book. Even if you were fluent in the spoken language, it's years of work to learn to read.

Maia is just now passing the 3rd year Kanji test (As in what Japanese 3rd graders can read), and she has been here for 3 years... I have 1st year down (The basics, number, days of the week, sun, moon, etc), and about half of the 2nd year Kanji figured out (I know what they mean, but not how to read them). Children don't know all of the Kanji for reading a newspaper until they graduate Junior High. So it takes them 9 years of schooling to get to the stage where they can read everything in a newspaper correctly. At 6th grade, however, you are considered passing-literate. At that point, you'll be tripped up 10% or so of the time, but you can at least read the comic books...

So when Maia showed up with a Kanji game for her DS, I was totally intrigued. It makes learning these things a little more interesting than simply writing them down over and over and over... so I too purchased a used DS and picked up a Kanji game...

Of course, both of our DS's are in Japanese, and the games are designed for 8 year olds... but 8 year olds who are fluent in Japanese... so they are a little tough for us...

Which I guess is good practice.

But, as many of my friends will be interested in hearing: I now own a DS... and I am now entering into the land of pocket-video-games... I'm not above getting real games for the DS (I bought a couple)... but they really have to be interesting... We'll see.

--Me.