Japanese, like most oriental languages, does not consist of letters, to which we Europeans are so accustomed. The main part of the language is made up of special characters, hieroglyphs, denoting a syllable or a whole word. Japanese hieroglyphs were borrowed from China more than two thousand years ago.
Instructions
Step 1
There are many thousands of hieroglyphs in Japanese writing, not counting two alphabets: hiragana and katakana. It is believed that the minimum level is knowledge of about 2000 characters. This is enough for reading newspapers or literature. The hieroglyphs themselves are called kanji, which means "Chinese character". At first glance, hieroglyphs may seem incomprehensible and mysterious. But in reality, they are not difficult to understand. They do not consist of random lines, each ideogram is a certain picture associated with what it points to.
Step 2
It was mentioned earlier that in order to read books in Japanese fluently, you need to know at least 2000 characters. But all these signs consist of no more than 300 constituent elements. They are called keys. Sometimes these elements themselves are whole words. And many of them are rarely used. It is quite logical to assume that some hieroglyphs are used more often than others, and vice versa. Of course, you can memorize all the hieroglyphs, but this method requires a lot of time and effort. The key point in learning Japanese, and of course Japanese characters, is understanding the meaning of the individual parts. Agree, it sounds less scary than memorizing rectangles filled with dashes and dots. For example, the hieroglyph for "listen"? Is not so difficult if you see that it consists of two keys: gate? and ear?
Step 3
So let's summarize. Every Japanese character is not just a fictional character. The form of the symbol went out of its meaning, undergoing changes over time and becoming easier to write. Also, each ideogram consists of separate elements. There are 300 of them, and most of them are rarely used. To keep your eyes from running up when you see Japanese text, learn to break the characters into separate components. This will greatly simplify the task.
