I've learned 292 Kanji so far. I started really honestly trying to learn the kanji at the tail end of January, seeing as how it has only been a month and a half.. call it 50 days, this is fairly significant. I really owe it all to Remembering the Kanji by James W. Heisig. It is, bar none, the only way to really try and take on written Japanese as a second language.

Its pretty freaking cool.

I created my own 4 character Idiom: 只寺永自

只 Only
寺 Buddhist Temple
永 Eternity
自 Oneself

The only Buddhist Temple is the Eternal Self

Expect a bunch more as I learn more and more of the Kanji. For now I call them 外人熟語, or "Out Side Person Idioms".

So the learning of Japanese is progressing. I can devote about 45 mins to 2 hours to the task, depending on my workload, and the traffic situation—which is to say that if the bus gets stuck in traffic, I have more time to study. I have decided to somewhat ignore the spoken langauge, and focus more on the written language. This has a fwe implications that are way beyond the scope of this entry, which, as you might gather from the title, is painted with a very broad brush to begin with.

Now, for a little diversion due to an Unexpected Twist of Fate. For me to really write about Kanji (or even Japanese) I need to input characters as, well, characters, not as graphics. finding the character, putting it in my copy buffer, pasting it into photoshop, saving it, uploading it, and that whole rig-a-ma-role is—quite frankly—annoying. If you want to see the characters as they are, you have a few different options: 1) Get a mac. They natively handle oriental character sets. Not only do they do it, but they do it nicely. 2) Install Asian Language Support for your PC. Goto Preferences-> Regional Language Options -> Languages Tab -> Make sure "Install Files for East Asian Languages" is checked. It really isn't hard to do, and there is a certain innate beauty to Asian languages, even if you cannot read them. It makes me wonder how English looks to foreign eyes.

Now, In a previous entry I had expounded upon the poetry of the Kanji, how they seem to have an innate beauty, well, after sitting down and seriously trying to learn the Kanji, my tune has changed. There is beauty, but there is a strangeness to the written language as well. if you ever ever interested in a concrete example of the queerness, talk to me about "Harry the Freaking Clam" the one eyed bad-ass walking shellfish. That being said, I am continually learning that there is still beauty and poetry to be found not only in the Kanji, but in the higher elements of the language.

Now, one example of the beauty of Japanese is the so-called 4 Character Idioms. A 4 character idiom is exactly that, 4 characters that carry with it a moral or a meaning. Sometimes the meaning and idiom is simple like 四字熟語 for example, with 四 meaning 4, 字 meaning character, and 熟語 which is a kanji compound that means "idiom; idiomatic phrase; kanji compound". Now, you can further separate 熟語 to its component Kanji: 熟 can mean "ripen; mature; or acquire skill" (additionally mellow) and 語 means "word; speech; or language". What this means is that 四字熟語 can be directly translated as "4 character idiomatic compound", but can also have the deeper connotation of "4 character mature language" or even "4 character ripened speech" which gives this quality as if our idiom was a fruit that we could pull off of a tree, and tear into like a ripened apple.

Now another example is 起承転結, which translates into "intro, development, turn, and conclusion" which in reference to a style of poetry. How about this one: 一(one) 石(stone) 二(two) 鳥(bird). You can guess the meaning of that one. How about this? 十(ten)人(people)十(ten)色(colours) or to translate: To each their own. And finally, this one: 我(my)田(rice field)引(pull)水(water), drawing water to ones own field, or as we might say, look out for number one. Now, there are plenty of Kanji for the concept of oneself, like 自 or 吾, but the Kanji 我 has 2 very interesting alternate meanings as well, "ego" and "selfish".

Maybe next time I'll talk about stroke order and the Eight Principles of Yong.

Reading character-based Asian languages is really cool in that you look at the characters and your brain responds by directly understanding the idea behind the characters. There is no need to know the pronunciation of the character. Now, even though you may not know how to pronounce every Western word you read either, there is a profound difference: it is rare to look at a word and instantly know what it means, but not be able to say it. It is far more common to be able to pronounce a word, but have no idea what it means, right?

From Japanese for the Western Brain.

To drive the example home a little more, in a previous entry I showed you the Kanji for sun, moon, bright, tree, east, and forest. If you can remember those characters, you can read those Japanese (or even Chinese) words. But that won't help you at all if you ever want to say that word outloud.

The very thought me taking that final step of being an Otaku Gaijin fills me with a certain amount of pride and dread (pread? dride?). Nothing says "Hard Core Geek" like learning Japanese.

What has made me take the plunge is a rather long rant, involving a whiteboard, lots of beers, and Jason Stormchild. He was showing me some Kanji, and how some kanji have an etymological basis. To the right, you can see the kanji for 'sun' and 'moon'. When you put those two characters together, you get the kanji for 'bright'. Similarly, the kanji for 'forest', is 3 trees done up together. Finally, there is the kanji for 'east', which is a combination of the kanji for sun and the kanji for tree, so it is like the sun rising in the east, peeking out through the trees.

It was this explanation (which, was way more poetically put by Jason) plus the repeated assertions that I would be one of the people to get a lot out of learning kanji that made me take the plunge. Learning a new verbal language has the same kind of potential as learning a new programming language, except, I rather suspect, that instead of changing the way you think about programming, it changes the way you think about thinking.