Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana

There are three writing systems in Japan: Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana. I don't know much yet, but I do know Katakana is phonetic and is used to write non-native words to the Japanese. Coffee, lemon, and fax are examples are new words to the Japanese language. They are spelled using Katakana, but not pronounced the same. The words must be stretched to fit the language. (Imagine: "fax-uh")

To the left is the city Tokyo written using Kanji (I think). Kanji are the characters brought from China thousands of years ago. Unlike written Chinese where they are as many as 80,000 known characters, the Japanese government has strict controls on the number of characters here. It is limited to approximately 2,000.

Hiragana is used as a the grammatical glue, where as Kanji is used for objects and concepts. Richard has told me learning Katakana and Hiragana can be accomplished in a few days with books. There are very few characters -- less than 100 to learn for these two systems. They are decidedly more Roman -- or Korean (another phonetic language).

I bought a book about each of the languages from amazon.co.jp two days ago. It is frustrating to not be able to read the restaurant menus. If I could speak 100 food words and read 100 Kanji characters, I might be able to order lunch at a small Japanese restaurant.