The Japanese writing system has a long and deep history, tracing back to the scratching on Oracle Bones in ancient China. This depth of history thus carries a huge weight of etymology behind it. This etymology is not just frivolous either. The old forms of chinese are used in Chop Seals which are effectively signatures of legal documents.

The difficult thing with the etymology of a given Kanji is actually quite problematic. When Han'zi characters were imported to japan, they were (generally) imported as their "traditional" version. During the communist revolution in China, the government simplified a great number of characters. Thus, there are currently two versions of a given Chinese character. For example, the character for "see" is 見 in Traditional Chinese, and Japanese, but 见 in Simplified Chinese. To make it even more confusing, there are a few characters of exclusively Japanese origin (called Kokuji). Finally, the Japanese went through their own simplification process.

What this boils down to, is that if you are wanting to study the Etymology of a Kanji character, you might have a couple of places to look. The first step is to take a peak at this great Chinese etymology database put together by Richard Sears. You can feed it a simplified or traditional chinese character, and it will come back with results. The only time that it doesn't come up with any results, is when you try and input a kokuji, or even just a Traditional Chinese character that the Japanese simplified (if that is the case, you can search for the kanji you are looking for at the link I just provided).

On a completely different angle, the writing of Kanji has progressed in a different direction, which is to say, calligraphy. I'll be talking about that more in another post, but I thought I would mention 2 great calligraphic dictionaries I have found:

http://www.font.com.cn/fontzd/

http://www.9610.com/zidian/index.asp

Both dictionaries are on Mainland China, which means they are exclusively simplified Chinese. This means that if you want to look up a traditional chinese character, you need to find its simplified equivalent. This isn't too hard, because Thats where Richard Sears saves the day again. It provides a good amount of information on any Chinese character you feed it. Simplified or Traditional.

Even if you are not studying Japanese (or Chinese!) you should go have a look at these sites, some of them have quite beautiful imagery, and it it is quite interesting to see the etymology of a few different characters. If you need some example characters, you can use these (you'll just have to copy/paste them):

• Sun 日
• Moon 月
• Mountain 山
• Stream 川
• Tree 木
• Gold 金
• Soil 土

It has been a long time since I last wrote an entry. There are 2 major forces at work here:

1. I don't have enough time anymore to write entries
2. I twitter stuff that makes good blog entries, because it takes far less time

So I plan on making it up to all my readers, and give you a brain dump of where I am, what I am doing and what I am thinking.

Management

Management is posing to be an exciting, interesting and challenging—erm—challenge. I am slowly starting to get a handle of the job, the responsibilities, etc. The other seniors on the team have been a big help with this. I just keep plugging along and try to learn as much as I can from the people around me.

As part of being I have received a lappy by the evil masters, which is as good, if not better than both my desktop at work and at home. This is hella cool. This of course necessitates the re installation of the "software server stack of doom", code editor, utilities, productivity tools, etc. etc. etc. This is a perfect opportunity for me to make a jump that I have been fighting for a LONG time...

Emacs

I started working with emacs last year, mostly to edit and work with scheme code. What this meant was that I would goto work, edit code in jEdit and then come home, and edit code in emacs. I am a relatively proficient editor-of-code with jEdit, but emacs has always felt really uncomfortable. But since I have to re-install everything anyway, I thought that this would be the perfect time to take the plunge and start using emacs for everything, work and personal projects. I found a relatively decent window distribution, so it is time to make a go of it. I've since found some cool tools, including a Javascript REPL for emacs, as well as instructions to connect Oracle to emacs. The crux here is that I am going to take a bit of a performance hit at work while I get ramped up on working with emacs, but this will also mean I have a good 4-12 hours (depending on my day) to spend on emacs. Basically its time to approach emacs by jumping right into it. Kind of like the best way to learn a whole new language...

Japanese

Learning Japanese has been going well. I have a small selection of manga that I am slowly going through and reading. There is a lot that I miss, but there is a lot to pick up on as well, due to context. I am up into 500 kanji now, with only a 1-4% failure rate. It is really interesting to see a chunk of Japanese text and actually understand a little about what is trying to be communicated on. I still maintain that Japanese is going to be a long-term learning adventure of 10 years. Thank god for my PDA and flashcard software (twinkle), without it there would be no way I could even think about trying to learn this crazy wonderful language. Twinkle lets me define my own flashcards, and practice all of my Japanese wherever and whenever. Very handy for the commute to and from work.

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.