Japanese Literature

[gollum]

Originally posted by LeftEyeNine
To me, no other language feels understandable as much as Nihongo does, highly like given the fact that both languages are quite similar by their structures.

Indeed, in fact this seems to have led to speculations from linguists, anthropologists as to common roots between the two languages.

Actually I'd really enjoy being able to read in Nihongo.

A good proposition, but a lot of hard work; japanese has 3 alphabets in effect:

katakana: is a form of simplified kanji (chinese character) that is used to transliterate foreign words into the japanese language. For example, miluku (or miruku as r and l in japanese are used interchangeably = milk) would be written in katakana.

hiragana: is a form if simplified kanji that has a 1:1 correspondence with the japanese phonetic blocks it represents. This is used to render the japanese language excatly.

and finally the

kanji: the well known Chinese alphabet of image-letters, that was introduced and adopted in Japan. While the Chinese and the Japanese use the very same kanji with the exact same meaning they pronounce them differently; phonetically japanese is akin to italian, that is the phonetic blocks maintain a consonant-vowel sequence for example ku, mu etc.

Chinese on the other hand is far more consonant heavy and its sequences frequently incorporate consonant-consonant combinations that make it sound more convoluted.

It follows that Chinese and Japanese can almost read signs or even books in each other's language - but cannot verbally communicate with each other.

The use of kanji in the japanese language produce the somewhat weird effect that the phonetic provenience of word roots is different from the letteral one.

It has been statistically estimated that the knowledge of about 200-300 kanji is the absolute minimum to get by in everyday life, with a well educated person knowing about 1000.

[Azathoth]

There's a buttload of Zatoichi movies about this blind samurai.