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Sunday, October 23, 2011

The Writing in Japan
Japanese language is one of the most complex languages in the world, ever for a Japanese born and raised in Japan it takes years to learn it, they have to take Japanese language classes even at high school.
The most difficult to learn is their way of writing. It’s funny to think that Japanese didn’t have a way of writing, until they opened their boards and started to coexist with Chinese people. That’s when they adopted the way of writing of Chinese people, but Japanese readapted their characters to create their own alphabet, named Hiragana






But Japanese People have a very strong feeling of belonging to their culture so the new alphabet is used only for words which a Japanese origin, so for foreign words they created a new alphabet called Katakana:
But those two alphabets are just the base of the language and just use them is unpractical because the sentences became too and there are a lot of synonyms so they use the third alphabet, with more elaborated characters and each character is unique to describe something (a word, an idea, an animal, etc.) this alphabet came from the Chinese alphabet (actually Kanji means “Chinese character”) but the way each symbol reads is different in China that it is in Japan. There is a List of the 1400 indispensable Kanji’s called the joyo Kanji. This is a new example of how by the pressure of foreigners the Japanese culture has been affected.

The correct way of writ Kanji’s is considered an art in Japan it’s called Shodo.

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