Let's face it. Westerners view the Japanese writing system
with a mixture of fear and awe. I commonly hear people say in admiration, "How
can you remember all of those characters? If you add just one line, the whole
meaning of the word changes!"
Well, let me show you something in English.
Interior Inferior
That's right. By moving just one small curved line, the
meaning of a word can be drastically changed in English, as well. It's not as
if Japanese were the only language where accuracy is important.
Actually, as we'll be seeing very shortly, the two Japanese
syllabaries are extremely straightforward and easy to use. The syllabaries are
so named because each character represents an entire syllable, rather than a
part of a syllable. So whereas the letter k
in English must be paired with something else to make a pronounceable syllable,
just one character in Japanese can be pronounced ka.
Unlike in English, where the placement of a letter in a word
and its neighboring letters can affect the pronunciation, the characters we'll
be learning are virtually always pronounced in exactly the same way. In fact,
you already know how to spell in Japanese. Now it's just a matter of putting
characters with the sounds.