| sethnintendo said: What I don't get is how the hell can you ever learn to read Japanese or Chinese. Just a bunch of weird looking symbols. Plus don't they write up and down or right to left or some weird shit like that. |
Learning Kanji is the hardest part for sure, but it's easier in Japanese because they use a combination of Kanji and Kana, which is phoenetic. Japanese is often written up->down, right->left (the traditional method, used in books), but it can be used horizontally left to right too.
Basically you can read it by being constantly bombarded by it 24/7, and practically no other way. Japanese and Chinese students go through intensive learning in middle and high school to get a couple thousand memorized. There are advanatages to it, particularly if you're a visual person, in that words are often constucted using kanji that are representative of ideas. It's basically how root woods work in English (television = tele, distant; vision, to see), and can simplify reading if you've truly memorized it all and understand how the words are constructed. It sounds daunting from outside, but native speakers can't imagine not using them.
