Japanese 101

Guess what? I felt like sharing my experience at learning japanese. Hopefully, this message on the english blog gonna be shorter than the one in french. I assume that most people that will read the part here are from AnimeNfo and already know a thing or two about japanese already. But I do have one or two things that been itching since I've been on the actual learning.

Yeah of course I knew there was different form of written japanese. Hiragana, katakana and kanji. Which was already something strange in my mind. Why in hell would you need three differents form of wrtting in one language. I mean what the hell was the idea? Who thought of that? And worst, who said to this guy that it was a great idea? "You're genius dude-san! Keep with it you'll be rich!" But hey, just before starting I started checking on it seriously it came to my mind that it was no more different than having capital letters for names or to start a sentence. So... maybe "Genius-san" was not that dumb, only different and special... special like little kid that have their uncle as father.

So anyway... I first learn that kanjis are drectly from chinese inspiration. Ok. Fine to me, I mean even Genius-san needed a source to start from. Ok.

Second, there is hiragana. Those little 46 symboles are actually inspired and are contracted form of.... chinese's kanjis.... again... Why... not? So I start on it. Five hours a day during one full week. I learn by heart every single symbols with every variation. 104 sounds.

And yes the kanjis are hard to udnerstand and read. But Genius-san thought about it, and the hiragan is the solution. Which is really, truly brilliant in fact. Cause it would have been a pain to try to explain every symbols to everyone everytime they see something they don't understand. It was intelligent, well thought adn certianly needed. The easy way to understand all this chinese gibberish. So yes, there is a seal of approval for Genius-san there.... except... except... that... he had another strike of genius.

Katakana.

Somewhere from his twisted, he thought, that in all wisdom, we needed a third form of writting. Yes, of course, obviously. Why no one thought of it before. We needed this third form for giving more dept to the writings. And in a xenophobe way of thinking, needed something to make minority apparent even when writing. And worst of it, you discover that these are the exact same 46 sounds your learned in hiragana but written differently. I am learning the same thing a second time for a different form of writing that don't even look like the first one. Oh my gog, Genius-san is probably the earlier version of Machiavel. I can't see no other explanation, or he was some kind of Satan's reincarnation maybe.

And even going through all that the absolute cherry on this fucking cake. Kanjis... have... two prononciations... depending if they are alone or complex. And I have to learn over 1500 of them to read a newspaper.

So, briefly:

46 Hiragana and variations (104 sounds)

46 Katakana and variations.

1500 Kanjis with 2 prononciations each (3000 words)

And I still can't remember every hiragana perfectly and even less for katakana.

I think I'm going to go cry in the corner now, close my eyes and hope that everything will be better when I open them again.

God, I really love this language (no sarcasm) the more I learn, the more I appreciate it.

Seeya.