After all of those years living in Japan, I finally decided rather belatedly that I would learn Japanese. Not just simply learn to speak it, but to learn to read...in Kanji.
When you read manga, you are usually pretty lucky as a lot of them have assisting text called furigana. It's basically the word written in hiragana and katakana. And it's not always the exact word that the kanji word is calling out as Japanese is a complex language.
Unlike the American alphabet, the Japanese language is made up of hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana is the most commonly used for native words, while katakana covers those words imported outside of Japan. Then we have kanji...yes, let's talk about kanji. About how many characters there are, and how they can be read differently depending on the context of the sentence. And how they combine to form different words. It's enough to make you cry, which is probably why all of my Japanese friends always looked so stressed! I didn't realize how easy I had it until I started to learn kanji.
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