Chapter 3: The Writing System
The Japanese writing system is surely the largest stumbling
block for students thinking about tackling the language. After all, languages
like Spanish or German, with their familiar alphabets, seem much more
accessible. Maybe you throw in a tilde here or an umlaut there, but all in all,
it's the alphabet we know and love in English.
It's my job to show you that different is not necessarily hard.
Actually, I believe that the Japanese writing system is in some respects one of
the best-designed systems in the world. In other respects it is very
challenging indeed. To understand this paradox, we need to learn a bit of history.
There was a time in human history when we did not write. So,
necessarily, some cultures invented writing systems earlier than others. The
leader in Asia was China.
With a culture that goes back at least 5000 years, the Chinese began writing
basic pictograms perhaps 4000 years ago. These pictograms gradually evolved
into a stylized set of characters that eventually could express any possible
sentence, which is the basic requirement of a full-fledged writing system.