かんじ

The week keeps churning along. I would be lying if I said I had done anything interesting this week, like say, make tempura from scratch with vegetables I grew myself. Imagine today's post written by a hibernating bear. I think everyone in the office is finding it hard to sit still at work, looking at the clock, waiting for the six day weekend to begin on Saturday. I think Friday will pass even slower. I am splitting my time between visiting people, general tomfoolery and writing and, on the other hand, studying my Kanji. I get a natural, and odd, enjoyment from studying kanji characters. I found an excellent internet-based system that automatically tracks over 1000 kanji. And that's not even the best part: It's free. It's browser based and can be used to track your progress over years. Meaning it remembers to randomly go back and test kanji from hours, days, or months ago. One thing it doesn't do it teach one how to write them, but I can over look this because I personally don't find it minddullingly boring. Any program that motivates me to study is good. Knowing how to write them is important in the long run because each kanji has a very specific stroke order. A slight change and it could be a totally different kanji. This aspect drives me - and I would postulate most foreigners - crazy. If the characters are small - I hate to say it - but they all look the same to me. Yesterday I was convinced that two different kanji were the same until someone pointed out that - no - this tiny stroke is slightly longer, over hanging another line. This is slowing changing however, and the program says I know - but not mastered - 123 kanji. Why does it feel like less?

Some facts: There are 1945 officially recognized kanji. These are used in the newspaper. The average Japanese can read about 1800 kanji (inferring what is unknown from context) but can normally write significantly less. If you were to specialize in Kanji at university, or were a doctor, you would probably be able to read and write anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 different characters (including the old style). In reality, there can be as many Japanese characters as there are Chinese characters (which a quick wiki search reveals at a minimum of 40,000 characters). While I am no scholar, one thing to remember when talking about kanji is its connection, even now, to its Chinese roots. Out of elementary school a child will have had drilled into their heads exactly 1008 kanji characters (by copying them over and over and over). I am following this approach and just filling my head by rote, and if I don't get overly bored with the process, I will count it as a success. For the record, learning katakana and hiragana was easy compared to this goal. A further reason, tied to kanji's Chinese roots, to never attempt to learn kanji and distress one's foreign mind, is that each kanji character actually has at least two - sometimes four! - different ways of reading it. I am only studying two readings, called the On reading and the ken reading. The On reading is loosely based on the original Chinese sound; so normally they have sounds like Myo or ryo. These sounds are built up to make words. The other reading, Kun yumu, normally represents one Japanese word, used separately. (All this come with numerous exceptions.) The most interesting thing about the two readings, and the reason I love studying them, is that both readings always have the same meaning! This leads to many interesting connections between words and meanings when coupled with other kanji. Any kanji character can only ever have one meaning. This is one reason the Japanese Haiku is so valued as an art. In Japanese, by not the English translation, you can have all sorts of fun with meanings and sounds and context and pictures. So how does one know, with any given Japanese sentence, which reading of a specific character to use? That is something I am still figuring out. It's a complicated field and I have left out any examples for brevity's sake, I hope I have summarized it well enough that you can understand what I am up against.

In other news, I did a complete back up and transfer of all my photos from Mac's iPhoto to Adobe bridge. I say this because for a second I thought iPhoto ate 2 gigs worth of photos I took so far and my heart almost stopped. But no, iPhoto just gave me another reason to quit using the program, rip it off my hard drive, and drop it into the deepest part of the sea (a quick wiki search says that the Japan Trench, at 9km deep, is not too far away). iPhoto, for what ever reason the Apple corp. had in mind, puts pictures into a file type only it can read. Dear lord, what if that file gets currupted? You loose all your photos? So I had to export everything out of the program so that bridge could read them. What a mess. Why support a product that effectively hijacks your photos? If you are that paranoid make a better product. And on that note, it leads me to why I wanted to switch from iPhoto in the first place; I hated how it sorts photos for you. Some people really like but I hated it. Plus it starts to slow down once your get over 1000 photos and gets unstable at about 5000. Now I'm using Photoshop now and that's like going from a bicycle to a Porsche in terms of power. Thanks to Sean for getting everything set up and humming.