DJjazzyGETH said:
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. |
Actually, I'd say that Chinese Hanzi is easier than Japanese Kanji, because almost every Kanji has a least two readings, many being multisyllabic, while most Hanzi has one pronunciation, and every single Hanzi is only one syllable long.
