GAH! JAPANASE KANJI....BREAKING MIND...
I used only 1 Japanese kanji character, actually. Erm. Yeah. Kanji are the usually-more-complicated-looking characters taken from Chinese.
I'm thinking of taking a japanese class. I bet the writing part of it is murder.
Well, if your handwriting sucks to begin with, then probably yes. Well, mine is a bit messy, too, but I can write legibly usually and maybe even neater if I try. If you can handle a pencil, and can memorize writing stuff via writing it over and over like they had you do in kindergarten with English letters, then it's doable. My main point is that it's not murder. Well, I had a head start because I learned how to read/write hiragana and katakana before I ever took a class...
Shit, I wrote 2-3 more paragraphs after this but I deleted it because I felt it was too long-winded. Basically you just have about 40 main characters to learn, called "hiragana," and another set that represents the same sounds but are written a bit differently, called "katakana." All these characters are not as complicated as the Chinese characters ("kanji") and it doesn't take forever to write them. Hiragana/katakana is kind of like our alphabet, and you can use it to phonetically write out every Japanese word and stuff.
But they just don't stop there; they have to use Chinese characters to represent a lot of their words, too, instead of just writing them out phonetically. In Japanese, they don't use spaces between words... kanji kind of makes it easier to read/recognize stuff, then, and also helps differentiate among words that sound exactly the same but have different meanings. When you're done with first Japanese class (like, the first level... Japanese 101 or something) you'll have learned about 50-60 kanji or something... but sadly that's not enough because Japanese speakers know like 1000-2000 kanji... But hey you won't even know all the verbs/nouns/grammar of Japanese yet, just like with other foreign languages.
Impressive.
ここには、日本語を知っている人がありますか。いっしょにれんしゅうしましょうか。
