Alphabet Soup

If you have ever thought about visiting or even living in Japan among the many things to consider is the language issue. Convention wisdom has it that Japanese is a difficult language to master. It also stands to reason that as Japanese learn English at high school, it should be easy to communicate with lots of people. While the first assumption is an understatement the second is completely wrong. Now what I have to say next will probably go down like a lead balloon with all the Teacher types and culture geeks that make up the vast majority of foreigners in this land.

Trying to master the Japanese language is a waste of your time. 

I will now explain explain this theory which has been born of experiences over many years.

Like most Europeans, I used to look at Chinese writing and think wow, that's some complicated stuff. Any society that uses such characters for an alphabet must be highly evolved. Because they don't resemble our alphabet in the least they are mysterious and exotic. They are as much art as language which is why many westerners have them as tattoos. Complicated, exotic and artistic, I thought this form of writing was the sign of an advanced and sophisticated civilization. 

This changed however when I started travelling to Japan for business. Although I am far from being an intellectual genius I do have the ability to pick up enough language to get by in most places. It wasn't long before I realized that Japanese is a very imprecise language which is full of deliberately vague terms and ambiguous meanings. Even so it is very rewarding and important to be able to speak Japanese. I would recommend for anybody coming here to learn some conversational Japanese and vocabulary. The writing however is a different story.

There are 3 alphabets in the Japanese language. The big one is the aforementioned Chinese characters which is known as Kanji. There are currently 2136 official characters plus a few hundred more for family names. So, to be truly fluent, you would need to know not only what every one of the thousands of kanji mean but also be able to write them from memory. I say write, but really you draw them as you would draw a picture.　Now these are not words as such. They are symbols or pictogram's of  items like a mountain or a river or ideas like sadness or love. To complicate things these kanji can have multiple meanings.You have to understand the context in which it is being used in order to know which one applies. A kanji can have up to 4 different meanings and pronunciations. So you have a couple of thousand characters with up to 4 different meanings each. About now you might be thinking "who could possibly know all of these things"? The answer is....nobody can. Even native Japanese  don't know all of them and can have great difficulty reading them and figuring out the meaning. Even a simple name badge worn by convenience store staff can be unclear and needs a bit of guesswork to figure out what their name actually is. In Japanese you can have correspondence with someone but still not know their name even though they have clearly written it. It is quite clearly a stupid idea to base a language on such a shaky foundation. The whole point of language is that people can communicate with each other easily. Words are given meanings that are clear and precise in order to eliminate misunderstandings between people. Characters for writing are chosen so that speech and thoughts can be recorded accurately and should be simple in form in order to be easy to write and read. Kanji fails in all of these things. It is my opinion that in order to fully understand and appreciate Kanji, you must be born into it as it is more of a mindset and an attitude than a language.  Some foreigners like to sprinkle Kanji randomly throughout their blogs in order to show how clever and sophisticated they are. As a foreigner I have learned to recognise a few of them such as place names and other simple things such as EXIT, water, mountain etc. but I don't expend much time or mental energy on it. Life's too short to bother with this nonsense...after all if the natives don't understand it, how the hell could I?
 

Next up is Hiragana which is sort of the native Japanese script. Hiragana has 48 characters. Again they are not letters but sounds. It's a phonetic alphabet and splits everything into syllables. Hiragana is a freehand flowing script and to me most of the characters look like the random scribblings of a 3 year old. They can be very hard to read particularly if the handwriting is bad. Often Kanji are translated into Hiragana which just further highlights the unsuitability of Kanji as a mode of communication. The 48 characters can be used to capture all the sounds in the language. This would seem to me to be all that you would need and a good point at which to stop. No such luck. Why have only one alphabet that serves all your needs when you can have two?

Katakana is reserved for words from other languages that are now used commonly but for which there are no original native words. Now this would make sense if this alphabet introduced sounds that are absent from Japanese such as the letters L and V but it doesn't. It is basically the same as Hiragana but the characters are sharp and angular which make them easy to read and write. That's right, it's the same 48 sounds but written differently. Because the sounds are exactly the same as Hiragana it is completely redundant and unnecessary. It exists primarily to further bamboozle foreigners and make the language even less comprehensible and accessible. Having said that, it's the one component that comes the closest to my definition of a successful alphabet. Because it's easy to write many people like to use it instead of the correct Kanji or Hiragana. Older people often use it for their names and it's hugely popular for business purposes such as signs and menus. Young people like it too and many Japanese words are being rendered into Katakana which is supposed to be reserved for foreign words exclusively. This is the one I have put much effort into learning because my business is in the car industry and all of the terms and documents used are of foreign origin and so written in Katakana.

At this point a comparison to the Roman alphabet is inevitable. With only our 26 English letters we can recreate just about every sound in every language. Even foreign languages such as Welsh and Dutch that need a mouth full of phlegm to pronounce can be translated into English with only 26 letters. Japanese, with 96 characters cant even translate the word "Vanilla" properly. The closest it comes is "Banira". The Russian language is apparently the most precise and unambiguous in the world but the Cyrillic alphabet with 44 letters is more complicated.

So that's it in a nutshell. Far from being a sophisticated advanced form of communication the whole thing is ludicrously complicated and completely at odds to the whole purpose of having a language in the first place. The English alphabet, which I had though boring and primitive is actually a powerful and advanced mode of communication. The 26 letters have a simple beauty that belies their power and utility. This is probably why millions of Chinese are rushing to learn English and why it is the international language. Japan could quite easily dump the whole lot and go with the Roman alphabet as they are all taught it from an early age and can write Japanese in "English". Failing that, it seems to me that Katakana is the obvious choice for the one and only alphabet they actually need. All the rest of it is unnecessary, unclear, ambiguous, imprecise, illegible, illogical and an all round pain in the ass for both native and foreigner alike. If the point of  language is to create art and tradition Japanese succeeds admirably. If the point is clear and precise communication it misses it by a wide mark.

So if youre struggling with kanji  don't stress, the natives find it just as difficult and if your thinking of learning Japanese concentrate on speech and conversational ability. I have got by just fine on this method. Only language snobs need to know what the fine print says.