Thinking about Japanese I

I recently returned from a one week visit to Hongkong (香港) on business. Returning to Hongkong was exciting as it was my first Asian destination. Having learned a few kanji (characters borrowed from Chinese) in Tokyo, it was a chance to put this knowledge to work. I was surprised by a few things. Firstly, the characters in Hongkong are considerably more complex than those in Japanese. Secondly, even the simplest words were often different characters.

Still, Cantonese people living in Tokyo always find a way to translate these characters. How is this? While it is a necessity to order food and read street signs, Chinese readers have a distinct advantage over those using phonetic languages -- Vietnamese, Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia), German, English, etc. They were educated using character-based reading and writing. If you are not familiar with the idea of ideograms, consider that the word in Japanese for train is two kanji -- electricity (電) and vehicle (車). Together they are pronounced den-sha. When lifetime readers of phonetic languages are exposed to character-based languages they are immediately overwhelmed. Natives cannot comprehend a world without a foundation in ideograms. Thus, their efforts to teach are normally misdirected.

The study book for kanji I use is called Kanji ABC. It is written by a Japanese woman and German man and was originally published in German. The opening chapter in the book provides invaluable insight as the function of kanji and its origins. I call this meta-writing: writing about writing.

This brings me back to why native Chinese readers and writers can so easily absorb Japanese kanji. When ideographic languages are learned, components of each character are learned. Take the previous Japanese word for electricity (電). When I see this character, I see two parts: the top and bottom halves. The top translates as rain and the bottom half lightning. These parts are called radicals, or more technically graphemes. Unfortunately, not all characters are this simple, and the pieces cannot stand by themselves. While this may seem unreasonable at first, consider that English uses the suffix "s" or "es" at the end of nouns to pluralise. These suffices also cannot stand on their own; they must be combined with a noun.

If my patience provides, I would like to do more writing about Japanese. As a foreigner educated using a phonetic language, English, I often stuggle to understand new paradigms required in ideographic languages.