Ever since high school, I found myself interested in learning Japanese. It felt like a great challenge and a chance to try to understand something that you can't just force with old cultural expectations. It was like stepping into another paradigm that didn't exist where I was from. But I especially felt this way toward the Japanese way of writing. I quickly learned that they use a combination of three scripts, each with their own history. Two of them (called Hiragana and Katakana) are phonetic, meaning that you can just spell words out to represent them. The last one though, called Kanji, the oldest and perhaps the deepest of the three, really caught my attention. It's fundamentally a highly symbolic way of combining meaning. The word "Kanji" literally means "Chinese character", and I think that this point is where you may start to realize something interesting going on behind the scenes. Why are Chinese characters used in Japan? Why not just spell everything out in those other two scripts? In short, Chinese characters are highly adaptable wherever they go because they convey meaning first- they are logographs - and so they were easy to borrow. Let's use the word "Kanji" itself as an example. In the three systems it is written: "漢字" in Kanji, "かんじ" in Hiragana, and "カンジ" in Katakana. The phonetic scripts take care to clearly follow Japanese's phonology and break it up as "ka-n-ji". "漢字" though, we have already established, means "chinese character" intrinsically. So when a chinese person sees the characters, they will think of the same concept. But they won't hear "kanji", they will hear "hanzi". And if a korean person knowledgeable in the system reads it, they will hear "hanja". It's a system that transcends spoken language itself, it's a layer of meaning on text. Many times historically there have been people who have communicated to each other using writing because of this exact reason. It even made me wonder if such a layered system could be used for English even just hypothetically... Yeah, of course not. We don't have a library of chinese vocabulary from borrowings, no, none of that. It's pure struggle with none of the explaining power, so why move a way from a simple alphabet of 26 letters? This is normally where I'd pause. Rather than making thousands of arbitrary symbols to represent concepts, Chinese characters manage to greatly improve their memorability by using chunks of meaning called "radicals" and special phonetic components to recombine and make more characters. In this way, Chinese encodes lots of semantic history and even fossilized rhymes in its system. English is just different, right? We just speak words, made of sounds. Sometimes we have compound words, but those are clearly identifiable if you're fluent. There's no other choice than to learn and understand every word as its own unit; they are what they are, and there are no cute stories behind them, right? Wrong. (Stay tuned)