One of the challenges in learning Japanese is tackling kanji, which is not easy for Westerners, as it’s a very different paradigm from anything we’ve ever used. The usual way to learn kanji is to start at the beginning, with ichi, ni and san and all the other characters covered in the first grade, and going from there. Some kanji you encounter early on include jin, or person, which is added to the end of countries to make that nationality (e.g. America-jin is an American, nihon-jin is Japanese), and ko, a word that means “child,” or in some situations, “girl.” I remember learning that adding the -ya kanji for “roof” to nouns made a word meaning a shop that sold that item, e.g. hana (flower) + ya = hanaya (a flower shop). When I learned the word for car (kuruma), I haltingly asked my teacher if I could say kuruma-ya to mean a shop that sells cars, and the answer was correct. In making the mental leap myself, I’d taken my first step into a larger world.
